The Blinds

It all seemed so absurd to him: that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness. The fundamental fragility of it all.

So strange don't you think? To ascend to such a high position in your lifetime and then be totally forgotten? I mean, who even remembers Schuyler Colfax? Or John C. Breckinridge?' 'The history boooks do.

In [this] person, he had, bewilderingly, and for the first time ever, collided with another living soul whose continued existence on this earth he valued more than his own. Was that love? If so, then yes, they were in love.

The thought of just how inadequate the body's natural defenses --skull, bone, brain-- were in the face of the advanced physics-- lead, gun-powder, momentum -- of invented death. It all seemed so absurd to him: that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness.

There's nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that's how we survive.

No headstones for anyone, though. No official markers. Let each of the dead decide in the next life what name they choose to go by.

There’s nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that’s how we survive.

the only reward for the triumphant rat is a bigger, trickier maze.

Damnatio Memorae: the Condemnation of Memory.

That’s what happens when you wipe out a big chunk of a person’s memories: Fear breeds in the empty space that’s left behind.

Here’s to the person you might have been, and to the person you have become. May they never meet in a dark alley.

And fifty, he knows, is the moment in life when you stop looking forward and wondering what kind of person you might become, and start looking backward and wondering how you became the person you are.

[She] sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It's relentless. It doesn't care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.