You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

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.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.