Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted. Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and, after a time, bruises fade.

No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.