The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.

What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.