Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.