You can't polish a turd.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.

The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.