There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect it bids a man to ponder or create and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition men have at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine beer opium brandy or tobacco.

A lot of people because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed to be the repository of other people's hope.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.