I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.