“There is someone of whom I keep a-thinking;There is someone whom I visit in my dreams,Though a hundred hills stand sentinel between us,And the dark rage of a hundred sunless streams.For the same bright moon is kind to us,And the same untrammelled wind to us, Daring a hundred hills,Whispers the word that thrills.And the dust of my heart, laid bare,Shows the lilies that linger there.”

“It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

“In four hundred years, I’ve never dreamed. Vampires don’t. But after I saved you on the trol ey that night, you invaded my sleep. In my dreams, we’re the same. We can touch, kiss, love. And every dream ends with us … being together forever.”

“There will be hundreds of sons making the same journey,' he says. 'All of us riding with broken hearts, all of us thinking of vengeance. This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.”

“I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

“Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierceas the day we ripped Troy's glittering crown of towers down.Stand by me - furious now as then, my bright-eyed one -and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle!”