...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.