Velocity

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.

Are you prepared for the first wound?

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

They never learn. The smarter they are, the dumber they get.

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

Art is the only answer to chaos and the void.

Sometimes the heart makes decisions the mind cannot, and though we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering.

Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.

He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke.

Besides, some books contained disturbing ideas. They started you thinking about things you wanted to forget, and though your thoughts became intolerable, you could not put them to rest. The

GUILT SPILLS ITSELF IN FEAR OF BEING SPILT,

Maybe to his nemesis, the world was a stage, reality was a fraud, and all was artifice. How

He was in the tides now, but not by choice. Events had thrown him in deep, swift water. The weight of twenty years of guarded emotions, of studied avoidance, of defensive reclusiveness, encumbered him. Now he was trying to learn to swim again, but a riptide seemed to be sweeping him farther from any community, toward greater isolation.