In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.