She is dead. Dead so many years. Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life?
How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone’s life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child.
You steal the now of my life away, when you constantly fear that tomorrow will bring my death. Your fears clutch cold at me and snatch all my pleasure in the day’s warmth from me. As.
His heart had pounded with joy at the thought that he might catch her, might playfully hold her in his arms, for just a moment. They were children, I suddenly saw, children at play, only a handful of years older than I was now. They had never grown older, neither one of them, not really. All their lives she had remained that girl to him, that wondrous girl just a few years older than he was, but so worldly wise, so female to all that was so male in his life.
Too much on my mind. Too many directions to think in all at once. I sometimes feel that if I had time to focus my mind on just one problem, I could solve it. And then go on to solve the others.” “Every man believes that. It isn’t so. Slay the ones you can as they come to hand, and after a while you get used to the ones you can do nothing about.
The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away.
Malta,” he said, and smiled. “Possibly the most annoying young female I’ve ever encountered. Yet lovely. I named a horse after her. Do you remember?
You can’t die from seasickness, but you wish you could.
That is true. I could not prevent what was done to me, nor can I change what people made of me. But I know what I am and have decided to continue being what I am.
We live in our bodies. An assault on that outside fortress of the mind leaves scars that may not show, but never heal.
It was well to impress one’s enemies with a show of strength. It was even better to be sure one’s friends remembered it as well.
Who had that young man been who had thought himself so old and worldly-wise? He was a stranger to me now.
Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose.
Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day.
A man has to have a purpose in life. I know this now, but it took me the first score years of my life to learn it. In that I scarcely think myself unique.
So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.
Death stalks us, and he is ever sure of his kill. It is not a thing to dwell on, but it is something we all know, in our guts and bones. All save humans.
Who loves you or who you love is not as significant as who you are. Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for.
This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.’ ‘No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart’s beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day?
We’d had a message from Just, the first to reach us in many a month. He and Hearth had left home almost three years ago. With youth’s fine disregard for the concerns of their elders, they’d sent messages only sporadically.