So Stapes conducted a dinner for just the two of us, then informed me of a dozen small but important mistakes I had made. Setting down a dirty utensil was considered crude, for example. That meant it was perfectly acceptable to lick one's knife clean. In fact, if you didn't want to dirty your napkin it was the only seemly thing to do.

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

Just pity him, my boy. Tomorrow we'll be on our way, but he'll have to keep his own disagreeable company until the day he dies.

I won the only duel I ever lost.

Ambrose, your presence is the horseshit frosting on the horseshit cake that is the admissions interview process.

Whenever you write a character, you want to make them themselves, you want to make them unique. You don't want fifty characters in your book and they all pretty much act and think the same except they have different colored hair.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.