“Words were few and failing between them as though the silence that sat with them had laid its old lips on theirs and sucked them dry of speech. For where could one begin? With the weather? But here there was no weather. These few sad rooms were the old man's world. His horizons were all walls.”

“My mother's hands were sixty-four years old, weathered, beautiful. They were soft and hard and they held no duplicity of emotion. They didn't love and hate. They were not tender and violent. They never offered me the world and handed me hell. They were constant: I miss them purely.”

“I was alone in that room. Of course, there were bodies all around, but they were all dead. They were dead when I got there. Well, most of them were dead. The last few I had to strangle so I could enjoy some solitude.”

“I came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned. Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about.Every one of them had a good knife in his pocket, sharp, the blades whetted narrow and concave, the horn of the handle worn smooth.”

“He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.”

“Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.”