"I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't." - W. Somerset Maugham

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The Random Death Of Our Sense of Ease

"The human animal's drive to explain away the random fact of bad fortune...

Sudden death always threatens to strip away our illusions that we have some dominion over fate... When someone is picking off victims with the implacable dispassion of nature, we can't tell ourselves, "Oh, she walked home from the Metro after dark in the wrong neighborhood." Or: "Well, he smoked for 25 years." Or even: "She always did drive too fast."...

What we really labor to keep from our children is the same bitter knowledge that their elders avoid: not that people get killed by strangers, or that there are too many guns in our world, or that madness never sleeps, but that there is no logic at all to some of the worst blows that life metes out. Time and chance happen to us all, darling boy, and even grown-ups can bear it only a little bit at a time."