“It is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it.”

“People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.”

“When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

“The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

“Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”

“a bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it.”

“Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.”