The Signature of All Things

Moreover, he had learned that silence can sometimes relax a listener into thinking that one might be intelligent.

What life is, we know not. What life does, we know well.
—LORD PERCEVAL

Think of him as a brother, if he does not tickle you under the coverlets to your satisfaction.

The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”

“All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”

I tried to explain to them that my god was everywhere, you see. They wanted to know, ‘Then why can we not see him?’ I said, ‘Because my god is invisible,’ and they said, ‘Then how do you not trip over your god?’ and I said, ‘Verily, my friends, sometimes I do!’”

“You come from a family of ministers, then?”

“Indeed—and was meant to be one myself.”

“What happened?” Alma asked, rather boldly. “Did you fall away from the Lord?”

“No,” he said. “Quite the opposite. I fell too close to the Lord.”

Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page.

who liked to dare him into taking risks

“Then I shall tell you, Miss Whittaker,” he said. “I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.”