“Many will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and don it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm.”

“Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.”

“All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence the the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day.-FitzMost prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.-ChadeWhen you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.-BurrichWe left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life.-Fitz”

“Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change. The Fool in Fool's Fate”

“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”

“Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.”

“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.”