Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.
One can only walk so far from one’s true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.
Cats talk to whomever they please.
You can be the dead fish. I’ll be the old stick.
One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.
No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.
The fight isn’t over until you win it, Fitz. That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.
My blood will only buy you that fool’s regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.
But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die.
My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.
Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness.
I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else.
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... He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.
You know what I feel for you. You have known it for years. Let us not, you and I, alone here, pretend that you don’t. You know I love you. I always have. I always will.
There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.
Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey.
Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.
Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning.
Sometimes thanking someone is more important to the person giving the thanks than the one who receives it.
This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together.