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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
low tropical shoreline buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb.
puttee
gaseosa
excusados.
diffidence.
jefe
good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail.
breviary
altar stone
How could he guard her against the non-existent?
puttee
a tiny green snake raised itself on the path and then hissed away into the grass like a match-flame.
Children of Mary,
finca
It was the general condition of life that made for suspicion.
ordure.
God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’ and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.
If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.
zareba
frontón
Hate was just a failure of imagination.
shrived
It was like hate on a deathbed.
Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?
barranca,
coign
It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin
When a man wakes after a dangerous operation he puts a special value upon the first face he sees as the anaesthetic wears away.
Domine, non sum dignus … domine, non sum dignus….
He woke with the sense of complete despair that a man might feel finding the only money he possessed was counterfeit.
What was the good of confession when you loved the result of your crime?