They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.

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.

Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.