“What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?”

“Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until there were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. I can’t remember the world of light, he said. It has been so long. The world is a fragile world. Ultimately, what can be seen is what endures. What is true. . . . In my first years of blindness, I thought it was a form of death. I was wrong. Losing one’s sight is like falling in a dream. You think there’s no bottom to this abyss. You fall and fall. Light recedes. Memory of light. Memory of the world. Of your own face. Of the grim-faced mask.”

“Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.”

“I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.”

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?”

“A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.”

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”