“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything only happens a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon so deeply a part of your being that you can’t imagine living without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you see the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty; and yet it all seems so limitless.”

-Paul Bowles’s concluding voice-over from The Sheltering Sky (1990)