“I served on a jury recently. We got hung; we were 6 vs 6.”

“The good characters in my book are loosely based on folks I know. All the bad stuff is made up.”

“If I do start life all over again, I’ll do so very cautiously, but will I even start? Caution, understanding, it’s all useless. There is weariness, and nothing more.”

“Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted.”

“Whatever your grievances, I'm sure we can address them without resorting to war," persisted Argyle....Nonsense," said the alien. "Do you know how many laborers and industries we'd put out of work if we were to stop the war just because a few bleeding hearts think we can talk out our grievances?”

“You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is.’I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were”

“When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow.”