I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is the higher achievement.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Oh, was that liquor of yours a stimulant?" asked Elena. "I wondered why he didn't fall asleep." "Couldn't you tell?" chuckled Mayhew. "Not really." Miles twisted his head to take in Elena's upside-down worried face, and smile in weak reassurance. Sparkly black and purple whirlpools clouded his vision. Mayhew's laughter faded. "My God," he said hollowly, "you mean he's like that all the time?

Miles is... Miles; close to a force of nature, climbing up out of his own pages and escaping subordination to any opinion of mine.