“song of elli (old age)"What is plucked will grow again,What is slain lives on,What is stolen will remainWhat is gone is gone...What is sea-born dies on land,Soft is trod upon.What is given burns the hand -What is gone is gone...Here is there, and high is low;All may be undone.What is true, no two men know -What is gone is gone...Who has choices need not choose.We must, who have none.We can love but what we lose -What is gone is gone.”

“What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.”

“Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose-- What is gone is gone.”

“Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?”

“The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.”

“One can't ever be sure what is more valuable: what has gone away, or what remains.”

“Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.”