Only By Avoiding The Beginning Of Things

When I Contemplate The Accumulation Of Guilt And Remorse Which, Like A Garbage-can, I Carry Through Life, And Which Is Fed Not Only By The Lightest Action But By The Most Harmless Pleasure, I Feel Man To Be Of All Living Things The Most Biologically Incompetent And Ill-organized. Why Has He Acquired A Seventy Years Life-span Only To Poison It Incurably By The Mere Being Of Himself? Why Has He Thrown Conscience, Like A Dead Rat, To Putrefy In The Well?

Approaching Forty, I Had A Singular Dream In Which I Almost Grasped The Meaning And Understood The Nature Of What It Is That Wastes In Wasted Time.

It Is A Consolation Of Human Life That The Sick Forget What It Is Like To Feel Well, Or The Miserable To Be Happy.

The Expulsion From Eden Is An Act Of Vindictive Womanish Spite; The Fall Of Man, As Recounted In The Bible, Comes Nearer To The Fall Of God.

The Detective Story Itself Is In A Dilemma. It Is A Vein Which Is In Danger Of Being Worked Out, The Demand Is Constant, The Powers Of Supply Variable, And The Reader, With Each One He Absorbs, Grows A Little More Sophisticated And Harder To Please, While The Novelist, After Each One He Writes, Becomes A Little More Exhausted.