Sublime

It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying.

He did not sleep; he lay on the bed and looked out the single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land, until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him.

There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns.

She felt the pleasant authority of maturity settle within her,

it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

introversion and melancholy – traits the natives already possessed in massive hereditary infusions

the first story that, as he later put it, “rang his cherries” was Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.”

PALLIATIVE.

he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?