I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right. You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her. It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

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

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

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