He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.

What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.