“Trinities” – Nick Tosches

… The world will follow the streets to hell. And no one man, and no army of men, will turn the tide. The question I’m asking you is this. Does your morality – call it whatever you want, your code, your principles, your sense of right and wrong, that scrap of something in your heart or your soul that separates you from the beats – does it allow you to make money from the business of hell? …Given that there is no end to this plague, does whatever wisdom you possess lead you to side with your principles or your self-interest?

… I think of this world now as a black horse running wild to hell, its body filled with disease. I think of seizing that horse for one terrible moment as it gallops toward those flames, riding it and looting all that is in the path of its destruction, then jumping off before being thrown and broken. Just that one moment. That one terrible moment. Then I’ll watch that doomed horse continue on its way. Nothing will have changed. The world will be no better and no worse. The only difference will be, as you say, estetica.

I… just live with it. Slowly our paths, death’s and mine, grow closer. It’s like, I look aside, I glance through the trees, and I see it. It’s there. I sit with it, I sleep with it. It’s there. But I don’t think about it, I don’t fear it. It’s different. U mortu e mortu. Death is death.

…one dog barks at a shadow, and many bark at the sound.

… Even the truth that a man reveals of himself is often just a lie that he himself believes to be true.