People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.