He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary.

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.

Cussing like a commoner wasn't something I was tested on. I picked that habit up outside of high school.

Writers perform the so-called counterfactual thinking all the time. All the time. For most people, counterfactual thingking is a habit, but for writers, it is a necessity