Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Yes, light, there is no other word for it.

I gave up before birth.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

The only sin is the sin of being born.