But I rather thought--I mean, I heard you'd killed Balder the Fair." "I never did," snapped Loki crossly. "Well, no one ever proved I did. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Besides, he was supposed to be invulnerable. Was it my fault that he wasn't?

Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

I'm politically inclined towards the left, but I don't like to be in anyone's gang; I'm a bit of a loose cannon.

Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more a misery than the pain itself.