ACT I.

“Yes, people with ugly faces can lead beautiful lives, and people with beautiful faces can lead ugly ones, and a beautiful face can draw you right down deep into the world’s greatest ugliness. But in the next draft of existence, they will not understand this; how one person’s beautiful face could pull another deep into their greatest sorrow.”

“Hung on my bedroom wall is the quote attributed to Joan of Arc: “I am not afraid. I was born to do this.” However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it.”

“He loved her [… and] he wanted nothing from her: this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was a simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world.”

“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration…”

“I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere. I’m trying to figure out this thing He made called a man.”

“For a demon has no heart as we do, a little red fist in our chest. A demon’s body is nothing but heart, its whole interior beating and pulsating and thundering in time to the clocks of Pandemonium.”