But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.

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

No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from it.

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.