Strangers on a Train

THE LEADEN-EYED by Vachel Lindsay

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

“That’s the mistake,” Guy said aloud, “that nobody knows what a murderer looks like. A murderer looks like anybody!”

There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush

If he believed in the full complement of evil in himself, he had to believe also in a natural compulsion to express it.

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his br

That everything has its opposite close beside it.”

the ancient Germans had judged an accused man innocent or guilty by the number of friends who came forth to vouch for his character. How many would vouch for him now?

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart

he sensed that suicide was a coward’s escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.

It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne, or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already, and what existed of himself now only a husk