It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

You have to carry the fire." I don't know how to." Yes, you do." Is the fire real? The fire?" Yes it is." Where is it? I don't know where it is." Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.

Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.