Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties.
When both my editors say ‘This is really bad, you need to change this,’ I ignore that at my peril.
Start writing sooner. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t hesitate.
As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn’t enough life left in me to panic. I’d made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I’d simply stop being. Apparently I hadn’t died correctly. Oops.
The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.
Some people say ‘I want to be a writer,’ and some people say, ‘I want to write.’
I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.
A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
I am the King’s Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait.
Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.
I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don’t. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I’ve never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.
That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.
King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn’t expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.
Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.
Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.
One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.
It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?
Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.
Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.
Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.