You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

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

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

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.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.