I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious. - Ray Bradbury

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.

My waiter friend, Laurent, working at the Brasserie Champs du Mars near the Eiffel Tower, one night while serving me Une Grande Beer, explained his life. “I work from ten to twelve hours, sometimes fourteen,” he says, “and then at midnight I go dancing, dancing, dancing until four or five in the morning and go to bed and sleep until ten and then up, up and to work by eleven and another ten or twelve or sometimes fifteen hours of work.” “How can you do that?” I ask. “Easily,” he says. “To be asleep is to be dead. It is like death. So we dance, we dance so as not to be dead. We do not want that.” “How old are you?” I ask, at last. “Twenty-three,” he says. “Ah,” I say and take his elbow gently. “Ah. Twenty-three, is it?” “Twenty-three,” he says, smiling. “And you?” “Seventy-six,” I say. “And I do not want to be dead, either. But I am not twenty-three. How can I answer? What do I do?” “Yes,” says Laurent, still smiling and innocent, “what do you do at three in the morning?” “Write,” I say, at last. “Write!” Laurent says, astonished. “Write?” “So as not to be dead,” I say. “Like you.” “Me?” “Yes,” I say, smiling now, myself. “At three in the morning, I write, I write, I write!

You know and I know, I am Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.