“Fate makes our relatives, choice makes our friends.”

“Fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends.”

“Our fate is shaped from within ourselves outward, never from without inward.”

“Fate is fickle, and the company of unwilling friends short lived.”

“But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.”

“your lives be as full and happy as ours,and may the seasons be kind to you and your friends. The door of our Abbey is always open to any travellers roaming the dusty path between the woodlands and the plains.”

“Where's the point in fighting and slaying if you can make a friend out of anybeast instead of a foe?”