Silas Heilbron

“What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road