Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

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.

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

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.