There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.

Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.

There are things you can't walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward.

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

If you shoot, I will kill her before I die." Yes," Kitai said in a patient tone. "Which is why I have not shot you. Yet.

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already. That's right--you heard me: dead again already. I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?

Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them. It's probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.