I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.

If I could keep a single moment for all time, that would be the one. I became the very air; I was full of stars.

The world is seldom so simple that it hinges on us alone.

Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.

And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.

We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.

I had felt the shot coming; I hadn't realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?