As a youth, I was too sunny and filled with the milk of human kindness to be able to comprehend such a bitter moral to the story. I just thought it meant Dalton did not need the approval of his peers, that he was a nonconformist (as was I, and all of my generation. We were nonconformists together, in perfect lockstep, each careful to be a nonconformist exactly like all the others). Like I said, I did not get it.

Laymen are not allowed to carry around the blessed Host to throw at people.

War is fundamental. A man’s views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.