“… And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.”

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (July 1925)
Letters

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 190

Poems and Ballads (1866-89), The Triumph of Time
Context: p>I had grown pure as the dawn and the dew,
You had grown strong as the sun or the sea.
But none shall triumph a whole life through:
For death is one, and the fates are three.
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death;
Death could not sever my soul and you,
As these have severed your soul from me.You have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you,
Life sweet as perfume and pure as prayer.
But will it not one day in heaven repent you?
Will they solace you wholly, the days that were?
Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,
Meet mine, and see where the great love is,
And tremble and turn and be changed? Content you;
The gate is strait; I shall not be there.</p

Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 4.

Part VI
The City of Dreadful Night (1870&ndash;74)

From De Profundis
Context: If only this fear would leave me I could dream of Crickley Hill
And a hundred thousand thoughts of home would visit my heart in sleep;
But here the peace is shattered all day by the devil's will,
And the guns bark night-long to spoil the velvet silence deep.

March 15
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)