What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we're all failures. . . He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?