“Lleu is a hard lord,” said Huw, “He is killing Gronw without anger, without love, without mercy. He is hurt too much by the woman and the spear. Yet what is there when it is done? His pride. No spear. No friend.”Roger started at Huw. “You’re not so green as you’re grass-looking, are you?” he said. “Now you mention it, I have been thinking— That bloke Gronw was the only one with any real guts at the end.”“But none of them is all to blame,” said Huw. “It is only together they are destroying each other.”“That Blod-woman was pretty poor,” said Roger, “however you look at it.”“No,” said Huw. “She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she was longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns.”

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”

“[Olive’s] left foot was bleeding through a wide swath of bandages onto the tarp it was resting on. The bowl next to her was full of blood.Olive looked a little pale. “I don’t think I should move,” she said.“What are you doing?” Roger shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.“I decided I might try to eat my toes,” Olive said, closing her eyes. “But now that I’ve started, I don’t think I should move.”Roger pushed himself off the wall and knelt down next to her. He unbuckled her silver belt and reached with it under her dress. He looped the belt around the top of her leg and tightened it. His hands were not shaking. “Sit on the loose end,” he said, pushing it under her. “I hope that works.”“You brought flowers,” she said, blinking.“Olive,” he said. “You cut off your toes.”She looked down at the bowl. “Are they still toes?” she asked.”

“He rubbed his thumb over the smoothness of her cheek, thinking she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. “You don’t think you’re worth killing for?”Her laugh was brittle. “Hardly.”For a moment, there was only the sound of their breathing and the wind gusting through the trees. And then he said, “I disagree.”She stared up at him, trembling, her eyes filled with the questions she couldn’t put into words.“I mean it,” he rasped. “I would kill for you. Easily. Without remorse. Again and again.”

“I hope there isn't,' [a final answer] said Colin. "I'm for uncertainty. As soon as you think you know, you're done for. You don't listen and you can't hear. If you're certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery. You can think. You can believe. But you can't, you mustn't, 'know'. There's the real Entropy.”

“What was that bit about fish sticks?” he asked, climbing back into the SUV.“Oh, pretty clever of her actually, though I thought it ridiculous at the time. Sometimes Mom gets paranoid, thinks people might be out to get her, out to get me.” I laughed nervously at how close that hit to home. “Anyway, one night she was really freaked out and came up with a code. If I was everkidnapped or something, she would say something about me liking fish sticks. If I said I wanted fish sticks, that meant I was in danger and needed help, no matter what else I’d said to her that I was fine.” “So by you saying you hate fish sticks…”“She knows I’m fine and she doesn’t need to further involve the police. Who says bipolar disorder can’t be useful?”

“The little prince went away, to look again at the roses."You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."And the roses were very much embarassed."You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”