“Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom.”

The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature?

Babette said she liked the series J. A. K. and didn’t think it was attention-getting in a cheap sense. To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige. I am the false character that follows the name around.

Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

What an epic force he must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him, the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise, grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.

“To break the spell,” I said. “To get away from routine things. Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes. I have a friend who says that’s why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.