If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

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.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.