Light Years - pg. 296

These women with their needs and assurance, their dazzling selfishness, their smiles - he would never conquer them, he was too timid, too consenting. He was helpless with them; he was close to them, yes, enormously close, even kindred, but at the same time completely different and alone, like a lame recruit in barracks.
Alone, he lay in the sheets of the still-warm bed. He had drawn the covers to his waist, he could feel a wetness, dense and chill beneath one leg; alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life - it was not worth much - not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one - we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.