Wolfe Thomas

Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

By God! he thought. I'm getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain.

'and besides, Sally' (I said) 'we've all got to go some time, and there's no use worrying about what's going to happen. It may come tomorrow, or it may come later, but it's bound to come to all in the end'.

As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her vision in the western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing heaven slowly. And although she could not have said toward what pinnacle her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she had never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for which was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood. Thinking of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival, taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never known how to keep.

Strangest of all, he thought, was this union, by which he had begotten children, created a life dependent on him, with a woman so remote from all he understood.

Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of

our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.