Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.