The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai. "What?" "About your having diarrhea." "For you I'd get dysentery." "Now that's friendship.

Civilisation is only a pretense. In crisis we have become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and instead becoming the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone we will use the moment it comes close enough

I'm not a liar, sir,' she said. "'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.

I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction