Sometimes the harshest lessons were the most valuable.

You can learn by listening, or by getting whacked between the eyes with a two-by-four. I always found listening easier.

To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.

Now let's move on to the subject of how a real man treats his wife. A real man doesn't slap even a ten-dollar hooker around, if he's got any self-respect, much less hurt his own woman. Much less ten times over the mother of his kids. A real man busts his ass to feed his family, fights for them if he has to, dies for them if he has to. And he treats his wife with respect every day of his life, treats her like a queen - the queen of the home she makes for their children.

And the first king was a lucky soldier.

Strange, isn't it, that it's always more difficult to talk people out of killing each other than into it?

The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.