" Every day of our lives, I’ve discovered, we live with stupid mischance and clumsy melodrama, cupidity, greed, unnecessary suffering. We forget it, we mask it, we try to order it with our arts and philosophies, numb ourselves to it with diversions—or with drink, like poor Stanley. We try to explain and compensate for it with our religions. But it’s always there, very close, like some poor deformed beast hiding behind the thinnest of curtains. Once in a while the curtain is torn down and we’re forced to look. You know that. You went to war. "

― John Jakes , Heaven and Hell (North and South, #3)