The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.
She was so beautiful I had to move away.
There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.
With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.' 'Where?' 'Genesis, Chapter Three. The coveri...
And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.
I wonder what it's like to be dead.
I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?
The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
Grief is a peculiar emotion.
