In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.

Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.