The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.