"Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse? ("Novelty")" - John Crowley

I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done.

Not until the lamp is utterly shattered,” she said, “and all pages everywhere sealed up in mildew — but then one would only cease to be, wouldn’t one? Till then, simply changelessness. How deliciously restful. It’s what one wanted, isn’t it, what one had prepared for and sought after — what one had invented out of all the terrible longings and dissatisfactions, never knowing that this exactly was what one was inventing — and yet having no other reason, all along, but this. How pleasant and odd that it should be so….

One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones.