“The dead," he had said once, "need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead." At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known.”

“You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.”

“He felt as if he had told a joke and they had missed the punchline and were leaning to him, wating for the kicker, the all-illuminating kicker that is found only in jokes; or as if someone had asked, "How you doing?" and the spring-and-strap arrangement in him had rusted and broken and he would never again be able to answer perfunctory questions the way other people did.”

“He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone's dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste like starlight.”

“If he had even blinked, she would have been gone; but he did not blink, and he held her, as he had learned to hold griffins and chimeras motionless with his steady gaze. Her bare feet wounded him deeper than any tusk or riving talon ever had, but he was a true hero.”

“Wonder and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then, and came together inside him and filled him, filled him until he felt himself brimming and flowing with something that was none of these. He did not believe it, but it came to him anyway, as it had touched him twice before and left him more barren than he had been. This time, there was too much of it for him to hold; it spilled through his fingers and toes, welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his shoulders. There was too much to hold — too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.”

“It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying--generally you killed something--but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling.”