“The energy of Love beats analytics every time.”
– Pennie Williams
spoken at lunch in Chinatown on September 28, 2026

“But Ray Cole stood with us, all of us, in Baltimore, working, sharing a dark corner of the American experiment.”
– Dennis Lehane
The Wire, season 3, episode 3, at 51:30

“Since Penelope Noakes of Duppas Hill is gone, there is no one who will ever call me ‘Nellie’ again.”
– W.H. Auden,
attributed to him by Alfred Corn in his book, “Autobiographies”

“Hirsh was a good friend. I remember one time we robbed this liquor store. And he ran over a dog. He cried for two days over that dog.

He was a witness to our lives.

So there’s one less person on this earth who knows our name, who remembers our childhood, who shared in each moment as it passed.

You know, they say that we die twice. Once when the breath leaves our body and once when the last person we know says our name.”
– Noah Haidle
screenwriter for the 2012 movie “Stand Up Guys” These lines were written for Al Pacino playing “Valentine” eulogizing his friend “Hirsh” played by Alan Arkin.

“But the man, while still a boy, had seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners.

Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites.

The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.

We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things, die in each death. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of some, one man.

What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
– Jorge Luis Borges,
“Witness”