“He shook his head. He didn't know. He couldn't tell when he had woken fully. He walked to the horses. They definitely seemed alarmed. But then, they would. After all, he had just leapt to his feet unexpectedly, waving his saxe knife around like a lunatic.”

“He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320”

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.”

“Wait!" he yelled.I didn't turn around, I walked faster. Then I heard him slam his fist on the hood of his car. I almost stopped.Maybe I would have if he'd followed me. But he didn't. He got in his car and he left, just like he said he would.”

“He was going to make this happen. His feet and his head was set, and when he got that way, he always did what he said he was going to do. It was his pride. The only one he had.”

“Breeze chuckled. "He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he'd joke. Iremember how chipper he was the very day after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of ourskaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his step, making one of his inane jokes.""Sounds insensitive," Allrianne said.Ham shook his head. "No. He was just determined. He always said that laughter was something theLord Ruler couldn't take from him. He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-yearempire—and he did it as a kind of . . . penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But, hedid it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face.""We need what he had," Elend said.”