The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?

We are the hunters---and we are also the bait.

Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?" "That's stupid." "What is? Love, or my question?" "I don't know." "You don't know? You've tried that trick once. What do you suppose it will work better the second time?" "I don't love her. She bothers me." "You have just defined the very thing you denied.

I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.

Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.