This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.

You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?

Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.