An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.