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Raulin is dead. You must try to forget these past few years with their sense of impending tragedy. Instead you must try and imagine that some invisible power has carried him off as he was—open, air, free-minded and ruthlessly honest. He is one of the very few really remarkable people I have known and for that I shall always be grateful.

Nguyen Qui Duc: "Nomads in the old days travelled around looking for food, for shelter, for water; modern day nomads, we travel around looking for ourselves."

If I were a worrying man, you know what would worry me most? It's not the crack and the black punks in the projects. It's a feeling I've got about the normals, it's like they wouldn't mind trying a different way for a while.

I coul tell here dismal Stories of living infants being found sucking the breass of their Mothers, or Nurses, after they have been dead of the Plague.

Well, we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing. I pity any foster parents who take you on.

His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what's necessary to defend a woman.

In a brothel: Nymphs in congress, liturgy, sheer dance. He felt giddy, at the time it was as if he didn't see, hear, or smell anything. The women danced an unending magic ring-o'roses, to a distant, muted music, just for him.

You two have an inappropriate attitude toward life, and of course that in no way justifies people tormenting you, and indeed no one would be tormenting you if it were only that, but since there's also as you suspect...your face, and the look on your face.

If they say 'prick-pruck' you must return the gesture by putting your finger on your nose, because with us it is the belki. If you don't do so, you don't behave it a ketni way, and of course they will enoate because of you.

Every poignant thing that ever happened, every comic or horrifying or exalting episode that ever took place, is still drifting somewhere in space. One runs into fragments (and concentrations) of billions of minds there; it is never lost, it is only spread out thin.

But even if you imagined that all the corrupt bureaucrats disappeared that money wouldn't go into the pockets of the workers. It would go into the capitalists' pockets. It would be used to buy yachts and foreign sports teams.

I was heading into a future of half-heartedly grading the half-written papers of half-interested students, with no end in sight.

And when at the end of his uncompromising tirade the commissioner said, 'You shall never attend another funeral as long as you live. You may go', she went. Of course in those days the commissioner had the power to prohibit people from dying, let alone attending funerals.

We have the feeling we are in a completely enclosed space surrounded by sheer darkness. The dark is so profound that if we imagined for an instant we saw something bright before our eyes, it would be nothing but the red nimbus of our thoughts.

All was done in a spirit of genial optimism, elevated sometimes into parody. Architectural purists of the 1920s sneered mercilessly at New Hav, and Lutyens, invited to attend its formal opening in 1928, said privately that it reminded him of the ghost train on Brighton Pier....

Further up the hill, where the houses began, an invisible musician began to play bullfight music on a trumpet. I felt as if Mexico was laughing at me. It wasn't a bad feeling.

He'd be correct, senhora, if he could eliminate the craters. But what is life, if not a combination of stars and craters, bliss and cliffs? he best way to avoid the cliffs is to escape into bliss.

The world of Greene is a world of greys, I thought.... It is not that good and bad do not exist, but that they are so improbably mixed, in constantly shifting proportions, that we cannot begin to tell friend from foe or right from wrong; the priest is likely to be a reprobate and the sinner to have some residual kindness in him.

The practice of infiltrating spies into supposedly subversive organizations is as ancient as the hills. As J Edgar Hoover reportedly said with unusual wit when told the news that Kim Philby was a Soviet double agent: "Tell 'em, Jesus Christ only had twelve, and one of them was a double."

With literacy and tact and a lot of humour, Dina and Salah educated me in the Palestinian cause. The last time there was a pitched battle in Sidon, Salah tells me proudly, Dina, a slight woman of renowned beauty and force of character, drove their ancient Jaguar into town, picked up a stack of pizzas and delivered them personally to the fighters.

Over the course of many happy years, I've learned that every book has a spirit. That spirit searches for its reader—its favorite, ideal, absolute reader.

I have always extolled the virtues of traveling alone, seeking the solitary path, staying anonymous and meditative of the Zen of the open road—and I still think that silence, exile, and cunning (James Joyce's words of defense) are useful strategies to any wanderer, especially one who wishes to write.

"It's a strange and insufferable uncertainty to know that monumental beauty always supposes servitude," Albert Camus wrote in the last volume of his NOTEBOOKS (1951-1959), speaking of the forced labor that creates great buildings like this.... "Perhaps it's for this that I put the beauty of a landscape above all else -- it's not paid for by any injustice and my heart is free there."

Paranoia is the chronic condition of of fat cats, who are well aware of the disparities in income. The peculiar resentment for the rich or well-off in Mexico is expressed in the sarcasm of popular speech: fresas (strawberries) are wealthy, conceited people.... These beautiful people exist in an atmosphere thick with suspicion, often accompanied by intimidating muscled bodyguards.

Mexico is not a country. Mexico is a world, too much of a mundo to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine, and in every other aspect of peculiar Mexicanismo, it is a perfect example of thatness.

How did they meet, and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent? They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should have been so accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices.

But as always, just before dawn, the tiger goes back in his cage and sleeps, and something hot and awful rises from your body and blows away like ash in the wind. And maybe the next day is not so bad after all.