“You know what I mean. Is it true the folk hereabouts”—he pointed to the land ahead—“are cripples? Missing half their hindquarters?”“The fauns? Cripples?” I laughed. “By the gods who made them, no!”

“He said, “You misunderstand. We did not kill the nuggies and the other folk hereabouts. They see us, and then they commonly die.” “Of what?” I asked. “Of embarrassment.”

“If dogs had gods, those they worshiped would wag their tails and bark. If sheep had gods, they would follow woolly deities who grazed. As the world is, almost all folk have many things in common, as if the gods who shaped them were using certain parts of a pattern over and over again. The folk striding towards us through the green, green grass might have been the pattern itself, the pattern from whose rearranged pieces the rest of us had been clumsily reassembled. As bronze, which had brought us here, is an alloy of copper and tin, so I saw that sirens were an alloy of these folk and birds, sphinxes of them and birds and lions, satyrs of them and goats, fauns of them and horses. And I saw that we centaurs blended these folk and horses as well, though in different proportions, as one bronze will differ from another depending on how much is copper and how much tin. Is it any wonder, then, that, on seeing this folk, I at once began to wonder if I had any true right to exist? “Who are you? What is your folk?” I asked him.“I am Geraint,” he answered. “I am a man.”

“People were as they were, not not as he wished them to be.”

“...all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn't believe.... Batshit... It's a technical term... Fleidermausscheisse, okay?"Fleidermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better--not good, but better--stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays.”

“...Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?""I hope there's gray...Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.”

“Well, I might even get used to the idea that she had no tail.”