Friday

Waste of time," said the leper. "There's a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they'll swear they've been crippled or blind for years then stage a bloody miraculous recovery. Holy men? Healers? Don't make me laugh."
"But this man is different," said Christ.
"I remember him," said the blind man. "Jesus. He come here on the sabbath, like a fool. The priests wouldn't let him heal anyone on sabbath. He should've known that."
"But he did heal someone," said the lame man. "Old Hiram. You remember that. He told him to take up his bed and walk."
"Bloody rubbish," said the blind man. "Hiram went as far as the temple gate, then he lay down and went on begging. Old Sarah told me. He said what was the use of taking his living away? Begging was the only thing he knew how to do. You and your blether about goodness," he said, turning to Christ, "where's the goodness in throwing an old man out into the street without a trade, without a home, without a penny? Eh? That Jesus is asking too much of people."
"But he was good," said the lame man. "I don't care what you say. You could feel it, you could see it in his eyes."
"I never saw it," said the blind man.
--Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ

The morning was bright and propitious. Before their departure, mass had been said in the chapel, and the protection of St. Ignatius invoked against all contingent evils, but especially against bears, which, like the fiery dragons of old, seemed to cherish unconquerable hostility to the Holy Church. 
--Bret Harte, The Legend Of Monte Del Diablo

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West

We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.
--H.G.Wells, The War Of The Worlds

“Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.”
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World