All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.

So you say, with your shiny hair and pouty lips - and those breasts - just wait till you start dropping whelps, they'll be at your ankles one day, big as they are - not the whelps, the breasts. The whelps will be in your hair - no, not the shiny hair on your head, well, yes, that hair, but only as a manner of speech.

Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?

The art of illusion is grace itself.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.