The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist - it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.