“Time rarely weighed upon him, for he had many methods of passing it.”

“He could not do most things, and what he could do, he did. But William had always been capable of many things. The stress of choice had weighed on him.”

“They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.”

“Weigh each heart on its own," I shouted, "for how many of us would pass into the Afterlife if Osiris weighed our hearts with those of our akhu?”

“That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone.”

“The generations rose and fell like so many waves upon the beach, and he stood alone, a rocky, unmovable sentinel, letting the waves of humanity pass him by, hardly noticing them at all.”