It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.

He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

I got here the same way the coin did.

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

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.