I can take all my pasts, keep them and determine my own future. I don’t have to be what anyone made me, Brashen. I can be Paragon.
He lives day-to-day now, just as we do, fumbling forward down the path to the future.
In politics, appearance matters more than truth.
For a very brief period I was happy, and, an even rarer gift, I knew I was happy.
There can be no misunderstandings if there are no understandings at all.
The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgement.
They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.
Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely.
The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.
Ten times dead was very dead indeed.
How much do you understand?’ I demanded of her one afternoon. She cocked her head at me, met my gaze and demanded, ‘How much do YOU understand?
No one can have so little that someone else can find nothing to envy. Poverty and simplicity were not shields from the greed of others. If you had nothing left to steal, they’d take your body and enslave it.
Once she would have found him mysterious and alluring. She had grown wiser. Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you.
I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they stared at each other across a room... My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market.
We didn’t have to share a mind to share a heart.
Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father’s talent for it.
He gave a final shake of his coat. ‘I go to the hunt!
Seldom can one hate a person if one understand that person.
There is no such thing as an extraordinary coincidence. There is only destiny.
He spoke solemnly. “This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we always have, we go to it together.