Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.

Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.

Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.

I was needed, but I myself did not need. I had followers, but not allies, and only now do I understand the difference. And it is vast.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.