“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.”

“Someday you'll have to show me how you did that," Asharak was saying. "I found the experience interesting. My horse had hysterics, however." "My apologies to your horse.”

“If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a cliché-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet.”

“My experience with Khonsu had taught me not be greedy about time. It was best to appreciate what you had and not yearn for more.”

“He taught me who I was, something I would never have known, without his deft Handling of my personality”

“To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.”