Life

Joking about death-or anything else that oppresses us-makes it less frightening.

Άλλα ζητεί η ψυχή σου, γι’ άλλα κλαίει·.

He was everything your mother warned you about when she told you not to walk alone in the dark.

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

He made time travel sound almost like hide-and-seek or capture the flag or some other spylike game--only with higher stakes and greater consequences.

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes.Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets.

My style is bad white-boy dancing. I can do swing a little bit, but nothing beyond that. My solo dancing is sad. I use my arms, badly.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

I have my own matches and sulphur, and I'll make my own hell.

It's strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary.

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.

What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.

A woman needed half her leg amputated after she slipped and broke the leg as she was cleaning her bath while she was still asleep. Not even the pain of a broken bone woke her and the angle at which she fell cut off circulation to the leg, killing the limb. When she finally awoke, she was close to multi-organ collapse.

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.

She had a sense of herself being brain dead: running on tubes and machines.

Uh-oh, big boy. Your blood is in the water and the sharks are circling. Must be feeding time.'--Mea Brin, The Huntress.

We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed,' announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. 'Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.