Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.

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

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

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.