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.

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.