The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar.

When you get drunk you don't tear anything apart except yourself.

This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.