In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.