“In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

“There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.”

“The dead are older than the living, he thought. Irrespective of how old they were when they passed over to the other side, they have experienced something which makes them older than any living thing.”

“If you were a man, you'd know in your bones what direction you were going. It's an automatic thing, this knowing where you are, bred deep in a man's bones.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”