“I want to sleep awhile, awhile, a minute, a century.”

“You will not recognize me. This time, I put my pieces back differently.”

“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.”

“And the past, as always, stretched before us,

“Birth is agony, life is hard, death is cruel. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

“I am not a saint

Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you.

“People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.”

“In October I confessed my love for her, and she allowed me to kiss her.”

“And everything’s holy– everything, even me.”

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

gladiators were actually very skilled and expensive to train (not to mention charismatic and popular), so they rarely fought to the death actually; it was more of a… ritualized theatrical combat