Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time....

Humility adds lessons to our pain and suffering, turning the seemingly senseless into meaning.

(On WWI:)A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method...

I nodded, unsure if Ted sounded admiring or angry. ‘I waded in but I couldn’t find him. I mean, is it possible – the water wasn’t deep enough for him to drown. It doesn’t make...

His urbane brain cut the most magnificent capers, as, chloroformed by fatigue, it directed its incoming perceptions along the most absurd paths and enjoyed the utter senselessness of its associations.

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.

That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.

The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is a sweet dream. You understand why, of course. Why this peculiar...