Conversation enriches the understanding,

But solitude is the school of the genius.

- Gibbon, quoted by Philip Jose Farmer 

His love of the theater was that of an amateur. He picked up gossip, mementos, handbills. He loved technique, to walk backstage and see Ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. This was humanity in theater, the scar - the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges,who rode the Queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. Patrick liked that. He wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else.

- You’ve got a lot more time with her.
- No. I feel she’s loned to me. We’re veiled in flesh. That’s all.

“You don’t look so well yourself,” said Masters. 
“Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other peoples expense. . . .”

At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as a great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.

... even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

Talk to Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen...

I’ll have no friends. I’ll have no acquaintances even. When I get sleepy, I'll walk slowly back to the little hotel. The clerk will say, Good evening, Miss Jones, and I’ll just barely smile and take my key. I won’t ever look at a newspaper or hear a radio; I won’t have any idea of what’s going on in the world. I will not be conscious of time passing at all. . . One day I will look in the mirror and I will see that my hair is beginning to turn grey and for the first time I will realize that I have been living in this little hotel under a made-up name without any friends or acquaintances or any kind of connections for twenty-five years. It will surprise me a little but it won’t bother me any. I will be glad that time has passed as easily as that. Once in the while I may go out to the movies. I will sit in the back row with all that darkness around me and figures sitting motionless on each side not conscious of me. Watching the screen. Imaginary people. People in stories. I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain. I’ll wake up and hear the rain and go back to sleep. A season of rain, rain, rain. . . Then one day, when I have closed a book or come home alone from the movies at eleven o’clock at night-I will look in the mirror and see that my hair has turned white. White, absolutely white. As white as the foam on the waves. I’ll run my hands down my body and feel how amazingly light and thin I have grown. Oh, my, how thin I will be. Almost transparent. Not hardly real any more. Then I will realize, I will know, sort of dimly, that I have been staying on here in this little hotel, without any-social connections, responsibilities, anxieties or disturbances of any kind-for just about fifty years. Half a century. Practically a lifetime. I won’t even remember the names of the people I knew before I came here nor how it feels to be someone waiting for someone that-may not come. . . Then I will know-looking in the mirror-the first time has come for me to walk out alone once more on the esplanade with the strong wind beating on me, the white clean wind that blows from the edge of the world, from even further than that, from the cool outer edges of space, from even beyond whatever there is beyond the edges of space. . . Then I’ll go out and walk on the esplanade. I’ll walk alone and be blown thinner and thinner.

The Green Hat

The hundreds of books lay in soiled confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone

to the making of the soiled nothings that we are.

You gotta kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be.

Seneca

Our entire life is made up of parts, with larger circles enclosing smaller ones. There is one which contains and surrounds all the rest; this extends from our day of birth to our final day. Another envelops the years of our youth. One cordons off all of our childhood in its circuit. Then there is a single year, containing in itself all the seasons by whose multiplication life is made up. A month is encircled in a narrower circle. The smallest revolution of all is made up of a day, but even here we go from beginning to end, from sunrise to sunset…Some say that a single day is equal to all days in resemblance, for even the longest stretch of time includes nothing that you cannot find in a single day namely light and darkness, and as we go on to eternity days make these changes more numerous but no different, whether they are longer or more extended. So each day should be ordered as if it were the last in the line, as if it finished off one’s life and made it complete.

Many years ago there lived a well-loved Jewish sage named Rabbi Zusya. Rabbi Zusya was renowned throughout the world for his gifted insights as a scholar, teacher, and healer.

When the time came for Rabbi Zusya to leave this world, his students gathered at his bedside. During a tender moment the Rabbi began to weep.

“Why do you cry, Rabbi?” asked one of the disciples. “If anyone is assured a place in Heaven, it is you. You are one of the greatest and most revered spiritual teachers in the world!”

Rabbi Zusya turned his head softly toward the one who spoke, and looked him in the eye. His gaze was piercing, as one who can see through this world to another. “I will tell you why I weep, my dear one,” the sage replied. “If, when I approach the gates of Heaven, the angel who meets me asks, ‘Why were you not a Moses?’ I shall answer with conviction, ‘Because I was not born to be a Moses.’
“And if the angel challenges me, ‘But neither did you perform the feats that Elijah did,’ I shall firmly respond, ‘My mission was not the same one that Elijah was sent to accomplish.’

“But there is one question that I fear being unable to answer: ‘Why were you not a Rabbi Zusya?’”