The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

TO know the world’s injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom,

But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.

The horror may be due to the fact that all people share, in some degree, the impulse toward self-destruction; and when some one person actually gives way to it, all are exposed to the common danger. Or perhaps the horror stems from something else, something much less complicated: The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him.

I didn’t want to go on living in a world where the truth has no power to make itself be believed,