This is the end of an epic tale, the story of my coming of age, which, like in the novels of the same description, went from wonder to ambition, from ambition to disillusion, and from disillusion to cynicism.

True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but does believe in the communion of mysteries.

Maybe that’s what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.

And I wonder how well I myself can see.

To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.

Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.

We musn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about. We musn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty.

Because beauty consits of it’s own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.

As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.