He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.
Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.