Exit Kingdom

To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.

Your life ain't a target for the world to shoot at. The world is a target for your life to shoot at.

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.

I think maybe I was just waitin on the apocalypse so I would have something to occupy me.

It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.

Everyone's always tryin to find an entrance to the kingdom of heaven, she says. Me, I ain't so interested in entrances. All I want's a kingdom of exits.

Honey, she says, honest ain’t the half of what I’m not.

It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do. The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring. Then what do you do with the lines? she asks. And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says: Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.