And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.

Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.

Woman! Come out! I have—" She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. "I have come to rescue you," she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.

Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere -- the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.