Don't go alone to lonely places. - Robert Stone

The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation.

"Lately we seem to get into arguments about what the country's about."
"I thought that was the national pastime."
"It is," Ernest said.

She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man.