Determination could easily become obsession.

Immortality gets very, very boring. You'd be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.

But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.

Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.

They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.

He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed me because that meant it was all over the kitchen floor.

There is nothing foolish about hope.