Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do. — Samuel R. Delany

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.

Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!”