You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.

You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.