“Wagons rattling and banging,horses neighing and snorting,conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip,fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off--so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger,blocking the way and weeping--ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.And a passerby asks, "What's going on?"The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time.From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north,and even at forty some work the army farms in the west.When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them;when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier.The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended.”

“Some people leave, yeah, and it sucks. But some people don't leave, and they never will. And sometimes people are there, but you just can't see them. But they're still there.”

“Sir Eustace was with Royce and Stefan looking over some maps when he was informed by the guard that the ladies were asking for him. "Is there no end to her arrogance!" Royce bit out, referring to Jenny. "She even sends her guards on errands, and what's more, they run to do her bidding." Checking his tirade, he said shortly, "I assume it was the blue-eyed one with the dirty face who sent you?"Sir Lionel chuckled and shook his head. "I saw two clean faces, Royce, but the one who talked to me had greenish eyes, not blue.""Ah, I see," Royce said sarcastically, "it wasn't Arrogance that sent you trotting away from your post, it was Beauty. What does she want?”

“So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.”

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”

“Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.”