One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to… — Samuel R. Delany

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

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

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!”