I learned always to avoid glorious campaigns – everyone is more likely to die in glorious campaigns.

The sky all at once is overhead dim and grey, puzzle of blocks sprawl, their own horizon; the city looks like a cemetery full of weak daylight, cool and a little wrong, making Ella feel a little put upon, like leap-year day – nothing in itself, but a nudge jostling every other day.

I was told, or read, that everyone visits Veciofeni’s cave sooner or later. He stood in there and wept himself to death, evidently, and this manner of dying, so gently incremental, brought about the perfect preservation of his body as a consequence of his mummy-like dehydration and the saturation of his person with his own lachrymal salt.

The wind seems to be blowing through the gaps in the conversation like the rushing of empty space.

With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them.

Why is the station so far out of the city limits anyway? Most likely a collusion between the builders of stations and the builders of long roads.

I could say she looks like da Vinci’s “Lady with Ermine” if there had ever been such a thing.

Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.

Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I’m frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound – a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere – and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn’t a ghost make the sound of a train?

Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience.