I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.