My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

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

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.