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Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliable. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?

It's with us only that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.

But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?

One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn’t have.

In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.

Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.

Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from.