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They were so much absorbed in their thoughts that they didn’t know what they were up to. I even had an impression that the dead body in their midst meant nothing at all to them. But now I suspect that I was mistaken about this.
What with these and the hangover from a poor night’s sleep, I found my eyes and thoughts growing blurred.
He then asked if a “change of life,” as he called it, didn’t appeal to me, and I answered that one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
I hadn’t grasped how days could be at once long and short.
And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prisons as to innocent, untroubled sleep.
I’ve always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.
—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order!
But, as it was, the machine dominated everything; they killed you discreetly, with a hint of shame and much efficiency.
however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for.
really, there’s no idea to which one doesn’t get acclimatized in time.
How will you face that terrible, final hour?” I replied that I’d face it exactly as I was facing it now.
He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive.
I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
