For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

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

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

We'll do what life always does defy expectations.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

When does loyalty become martyrdom?

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.