A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.