“He who stands like a pilar dies in battle. He who bends like a reed is triumphant!”

“The trickster, the riddler, the keeper of balance, he of the many faces who finds life in death and who fears no evil; he who walks through doors.”

“A true warrior,” she said, “does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.”

“Who is it who decides that one man should live and another should die? My life wasn't worth any more than his, but he's the one who's buried, while I get to enjoy at least a few more hours above the ground. Is it chance, random and cruel, or is there some purpose or pattern to all this, even if it lies beyond our ken?”

“Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was.”

“Are not all religions strange to those who stand outside of them?”

“I am not who I was,' he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, 'but I know who I am.'...'And I won't give up.”