The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

...the heart is an organ of fire.