“The wine is gone. Only sour wine fumes remain. Drunkenness pretends to resolution.”

“Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.”

“The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.”

“As if the only genuine gestures were the small ones, the ones devoid of an audience. As if true honesty belonged to solitude, since to be witnessed was to perform, and performance was inherently false since it invited expectation.”

“Aye, Master. Only, how do we know where that dhenrabi might take us?” “Oh, we know that, most certainly. Why, the dhenrabi breeding beds, of course.” “Oh.”

“[T]he unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier--dead, melted wax--demands a response among the living...a response no-one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous--as if cursed--while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”

“Life's final lesson,the only truthful one buried beneath a layered skein of delusions.Sooner or later,she now understood,we are all naught but food.Wolves or worms,the end abrupt or lingering,it matter not in the least.”