Power: a currency that never went out of style.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.