Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.