Epigraph: ... nothing mattered in life ... only this keen joy, acknowledging the beauty of attack: running towards a man in battle to kill him, falling on a woman in making love. I thought, I am glad I have believed and felt this way once; it is false but only someone who has gone through the believing can bear witness to its falsehood. - A Walk with Love and Death, Hans Koningsberger
In the past, he said to himself, whole civilizations have gone underwater .... The agony was not caused by the fact that music, like writing, could suddenly vanish from the earth, but because he could not decide whether such a thing would matter to him. - The General, Allan Sillitoe
I told her of the centuries coming when our names would be forgotten, of the millennia when our nations would be a myth and our continent an ocean, of the aeons when our earth would be vanished and the stars themselves diffused. - Pigeon Feathers, John Updike
