He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
You can't. You just have to.
It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business$$$ though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name$$$ telling you how to make a million in ten years$$$ and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
It was as though$$$ so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous$$$ all of us let ourselves be deceived$$$ abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice$$$ since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.
...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...
It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language$$$ the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists$$$ the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.
Victory without God is mockery and delusion$$$ but...defeat with God is not defeat.
It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity$$$ that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.