The running pants were tolerable, Drustan decided, relieved. The blue trews had clearly been a torture device and would have strangled a man's seed. Mayhap men were fashioned differently in her time. He hadn't seen one other bulge out there on the street; mayhap they all had wee carrots in their trews.

We have to save the world," I reminded him. He reached for me. "The world can wait. I can't.

I always thought fainting showed an inherent weakness of character, but I understood it now. It was an act of self-preservation. Confronted by emotion too extreme to handle, the body shuts down to keep from running around like a chicken with its head cut off, potentially injuring itself.

It's a sponge and I'm a sponge and for a second there all our sponge parts are one and I don't just have square pants, everything about me is squarish because I'm part of a wall.

There aren't many sins in my bible. Giving up is the greatest one of all.

It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.

Mom raised us to believe that every lie puts something out there in the world that's inevitably going to come back and bite you in the petunia.