Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.

The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.