… there was language there in the room but no words.

He rose each day not rested but further abraded as if the sheets and the hours in the armchair worked at the thin layer of skin over him that was daily nothing more than a sack to hold his stranded heart.

… there was these two brothers far apart in age who hated each other. The way I think only brothers can. Because one brother knows someway the secret workings of the other and each knows the other knows it. And they either make peace with that and are friends rare and precious or they don’t and so are bitter with hatred. Because they know there is that one man who can undo them in any number of ways at any time he chooses.

Evil is not a thing that just sums up in a man. No. It is a thread that beings to run in a small way and then falls down through the years and generations to gain weight as it goes.

He could not help but think of Daphne cooking this food for him. Regardless of anything else, this meant something. Thinking that it is the small things that stitch us one to another. And wanting to be stitched.

Because the thing about desire and regret, when you’ve harmed someone and then have years to shred it and play it over time and again – the thing is you fail to comprehend the origin of that initial episode. You attach layers of meaning to it and feel it was an aberration, some moment of yourself out of yourself. That is what regret does. It allows you to live with yourself. You know what they say – all men in prison are innocent? It’s not that they are and it’s not even that they truly believe they are; it’s that they grow to understand themselves in such a way as to see that moment, the trigger that set them off in the first place, that got them to where they are, they see that as something separate from themselves. They come to believe, to know that ever again their choice would be a different one. Not only in the past but in the future. Because they cannot allow the truth. … The nature of man is divided. And because we cannot live in the light we refuse to see the dark surrounding us. Until it owns us.