O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.
This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.
We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.
To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.
Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.
Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.
Neither in thy actions be sluggish nor in thy conversation without method, nor wandering in thy thoughts, nor let there be in thy soul inward contention nor external effusion, nor in life be so busy as to have no leisure.
I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.
A thing which is not in esse but in apparent expectancy is regarded in law.
To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.