It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.