When all else fails, philosophize.

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him. What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another. Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.