That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doub… - Paul Bowles

The odious little dogs that French people seemed to like so much rushed out at him as he rode by, barking furiously.

Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless.

That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.