…everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget — the design of life; and good when we are forgotten — the design of death. - Djuna Barnes

For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn’t really ideal.

"None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. Don't I know that the only way to know evil is through truth? The evil and the good know themselves only by giving up their secret face to face. The true good who meets the true evil (Holy Mother of Mercy! are there any such?) learns for the first time how to accept neither; the face of the one tells the face of the other the half of the story that both forgot. "To be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.

Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.