But if you want to think about something really funny, consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Sha… - William H. Gass

O, Koh, the limerick is the unrefiner's fire. It is as false and lifeless, as anonymous, as a rubber snake, a Dixie cup. It is indeed the dildo of desire! No one ever found a thought in one. No one ever found a helpful hint concerning life, a consoling sense. The feelings it harbors are the cold, the bitter, dry ones: scorn contempt, disdain, disgust. Yes. Yet for that reason, nothing is more civilized than this simple form. -pg 177

So she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference, like a net to contain air, was intolerable; because she hadn't a single god, or goddamn thing to do, or anything she could look back on as done—completed or accomplished—only one pleasureless screw which produced an ingrate and a monster upon whom she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud—a son to whom she threw her soul at considerable peril, like a stone in a paper boat.

My illness is alive, the threats to my life are real; yet it is only my death I feel, only the lessening made by my own loss. I am gone, Kohler, right now; and who is so dead as one so dead to a moment of life that life can't raise him up? Not to be here, not to see tomorrow—which, when I see it I shall find as stupid and empty as I found today—is appalling, Kohler, appalling... to slip into the insignificance of history like a thought held in a dream...