Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they've gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they're going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It's almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you've gotten away with it, but you'll pay for it later.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Now that I am dead, I know everything.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.