They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.

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

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

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