“...I bit my tongue and sat through his detailed and strained explanation. Not for the first time, I realized he considered me slightly slow. My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.”

“I looked at her, wanting her with all the lust of my months alone and untouched. But I knew also that for that deeper hunger for companionship and understanding, she offered me no more solace than any man might find in his own hand.”

“I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.”

“King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.”

“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.”

“I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.”

“...a great part of what unmanned me was distress at the destruction of my own body. It was odd to realise that I had an emotional attachment to my own flesh. My deep desire to keep it functioning well surpassed simple avoidance of pain. A man takes pride in his body. When it is damaged, it is more than a physical thing.”