Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.

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.

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

Last words are only words.

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