By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.