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

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. 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.”

“In that last dance of chancesI shall partner you no more.I shall watch another turn youAs you move across the floor.In that last dance of chancesWhen I bid your life goodbyeI will hope she treats you kindly.I will hope you learn to fly.In that last dance of chancesWhen I know you'll not be mineI will let you go with longingAnd the hope that you'll be fine.In that last dance of chancesWe shall know each other's minds.We shall part with our regretsWhen the tie no longer binds.”

“This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.”

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

“For, "Yes," he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life.”