and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

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

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.