I hammered on the Poes' front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn't say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy.

The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know.

Fell?' he asked. 'Or was pushed?'

Anton shrugged again. 'It hardly makes a difference,' he said, 'when you are the man at the bottom of the stairs.

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it.

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer―

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.