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.