“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down at them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.”

“You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us.”    He shook his head, slowly this time. “History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.” He smiled enigmatically. “The future is another kind of history.”

“None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, than you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing.”

“Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.”