She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.

I believe that Israel is very likely not to survive, it's not going to last forever, and now there's nothing that someone like me can do about it, in that it's a threat of nuclear or biological or chemical attack.

Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.

Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.

As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.

Every sovereign country has the right to control its borders, and should. The idea that anyone would sneak over our borders without proper documentation to me is absolutely abhorrent.