A.A. Attanasio

“The surgeon tells me that you're a sorcerer," Pym said. "Is that so?"Jaki looked to the captain with the glare of the masts in his eyes. "Yes."Pym weighed this disclosure. "You speak with the dead?""Yes."The captain's eyes screwed up intently. "What do they say to you?""They don't talk back."Pym and Mister Blackheart laughed in unison...The captain said, "Mister Blackheart wants to know what kind of sorcerer you are."Jaki pondered a response and finally said, "I was learning to catch souls before my teacher was killed.""Souls, eh? And what do you do with them after you catch them?""I put them back in their bodies.""Ah, then you're telling us you're a surgeon.”

“Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe.”

“…not a fort at all, but a giant amulet, a city made from the magic in our hearts and the land itself.”

“The fact of that devotion is nothing less than sacrifice. The only good of which mortals are capable of love. To even begin to do good, one must be willing to go beyond oneself. All things made by man perish. All words scatter into the emptiness that is the future. Only love endures. Love for what is. Not for what was or could be. Love for what is—that alone is true love. That alone the future cannot dissolve. For that love is God.”

“And though they may be miles apart and indeed have never met, yet they have never been separate, because they are lovers to the beginning and the end, appointed to each other by God’s prosperous love.”

“…for a true Christian, all strangers are Jesus.”

“I dream of a true husband—a good man, not a brute, nor a champion of men on the battlefield; I dream but of a gentle man, one who neither speaks too loud nor ignores evil. I pray for such a like-minded mate, who will be ever for me like harmony to music, virtue to the soul, prosperity to the state, and forethought to the universe.”