Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

Real destiny takes everything-the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure-and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can't give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I've come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it.

My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.