Stone of Farewell

“Do you get tired, singing?” she asked.

Gan Itai laughed quietly. “Does a mother grow tired raising her children? Of course, but it is what I do.”

She knew that life was but a long struggle against disorder, and that disorder was the inevitable winner.

He wanted a home desperately. He was close to the point where he would take a mattress in Hell if the Devil would lend him a pillow.

Sometimes you men are like lizards, sunning on the stones of a crumbled house, thinking: “what a nice basking-spot someone built for me.”

There are three kinds of people—the living, the dead, and those at sea.

The manchildren, the mortals, have many ideas of what happens after they die, and wrangle about who is right and who is wrong. These disagreements often come to bloodshed, as if they wished to dispatch messengers who could discover the answer to their dispute. Such messengers, as far as I know of mortal philosophy, never return to give their brethren the taste of truth they yearn for.

There are no promises in life, Sludig, but it seems to me smarter to take fewer chances.

Part of manhood, I am thinking, is to ponder one’s words before opening one’s mouth.

Thank you for your news, Princess. It is none of it happy, but only a fool desires cheerful ignorance and I try not to be a fool. That is my heaviest burden.

“As with all dwellings,” she said, “of mortals and immortals both, it is the living that makes a house—not the doors, not the walls.”

Things are not always as old songs tell them to be—especially when it is concerning dragons.

Fear goes where it is invited.

Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.

“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their conscience with the gift of survival.”

Miriamele thought about the obvious truth of what Cadrach had said as they walked on, but could not understand why it made her so unutterably sad.