“I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.”

“Stop!" Narcissus got to his feet. "This is not right! This person is obviously not awesome, so he must be..." He struggled for the right words. It had probably been a long time since he'd talked about anything other than himself. "He must be tricking us." Apparently Narcissus wasn't completely stupid.”

“I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

“It was The Aeneid that had included the fascinating story of the Trojan Horse. Why anyone would accept a gift from a departing, defeated army had made no sense to her then and still did not. But, again, men had made the decision, probably drunk with their victory. Any woman would look at such a gift and wonder why it had been given, and then have someone quickly dispose of it.”

“Her parents wanted her to find her own way in life. That’s what they’d said countless times in the past. Of course, they’d been referring to school subjects and college applications and job prospects. Presumably, at no stage did they factor living skeletons and magic underworlds into their considerations. If they had, their advice would probably have been very different.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”