Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I’d emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident.

Yet for quixotic reasons – namely, that I enjoyed writing obits – I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city’s dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

An officer on an elevator in the Tower once told me he was proud of his job keeping bad guys out of society. “Someone’s gotta do it, right?” – but that didn’t stop him from going to church every week, for almost twenty years now, and confessing to what he called “the sin of locking a human being in a cage.

I flipped to the author’s photo in the Library of America edition of O’Connor’s collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo.“Okay,” she said, handing it back, “I’ll read it.” What in Flannery O’Connor’s countenance met with Solitary’s approval?“I dunno,” she said. “She looks kind of busted up, y’know? She ain’t too pretty. I trust her.

Happy people don't think about angels. And they certainly don't see them. As for holding extended conversations with angels, that's only for the truly, irretrievably miserable.

Pimps make the best librarians.

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.