“He did not want to feel old. He did not want to feel the weight of his age hovering above him, mocking him out of the core of a man’s pride, waiting to descend upon his mind and body.”

“Torka extended a conciliatory hand and laid it upon the old man’s shoulder. “Umak, Manaravak, Dak, and Tankh and Chuk will walk at my side. We will miss your strength, courage, and wisdom, but a man in possession of these qualities is needed here”.They left Grek standing at the edge of camp with his spear in hand and his pack frame on his back. As Torka walked on without looking back he wondered if he had ever done anything in his life as difficult as that.”You had no choice.” Umak came to walk beside him with Dak and Companion at his side. Manaravak and the two boys trotted on ahead.Torka eyed Dak and Umak without slowing his step. “Do you two imagine that you will never be old?”Dak replied with his usual curtness. “When I am old, I will have sense enough to know when it is time to step aside and let younger men take my place on the hunt”."It would seem the best thing to do,” Torka agreed. “But will you know when you are old? Or will your years sneak up on you like hunters tracking caribou… one after the other, each looking just the same until the stalking cloaks fall away and the spears of truth come out to wound you… until one day you are a young man trapped and rattling around in an old man’s skin, still believing that your old bones can do all the things they once did in your youth and trying to prove it even if it kills you?”

“They fell quiet. Cork wanted to say he loved her. He wanted to ask her to forgive him. He wanted to lay his head against her breast and weep into her warm flesh and feel as connected to someone as he'd felt the night the grief passed through him when he unted the big bear with Sam Winter Moon.[.............]"You've always made me laugh, Cork. That's not what I want now.""What do you want?""To feel needed. To feel that you need me as much as you need air to breathe. I'm worth that.”

“He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.”

“The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”

“Westley closed his eyes. There was pain coming and he had to be ready for it. He had to prepare his brain, he had to get his mind controlled and safe from their efforts, so that they could not break him. He would not let them break him. He would hold together against anything and all. If only they gave him sufficient time to make ready, he knew he could defeat pain. It turned out they gave him sufficient time (it was months before the Machine was ready).But they broke him anyway.”

“The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”