When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

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

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.

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

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.