Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.

Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.

This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was something worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things.

When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of "evil": the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.

Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.