Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.

The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.