“There comes a point in one's life where the people whom we grew up admiring begin to die, leaving a great chasm in the world. This is awful enough to deal with without having anything so annoying as feelings getting in the way of personal equanimity. And then, possibly even more horribly, there comes a time in one's life when the people whom we grew up with or the people who are in our same age group begin to die. I have had the disagreeable business of having to watch colleagues only a few years my senior perish without warning, though premonition would not soften the blow. I am now realizing that I am entering this time, the dreadful gateway of existence, the one that leads to watching the ebb and flow of time, the great rote and sussuration of life and death, and being able to do nothing but welter in misery and pine over the dregs of hideous mortality. Death is an unaccountable business, one that robs the living of the peace we believe to be --perhaps mistakenly-- our birthright, one which asks the living to pay for the departed in the currency of feelings, leaving us to wallow in emotional debt. There is a loneliness about behind left behind as is there a thrill of horror for what lies beyond. The sum total of living is to sacrifice peace in favour of finding it, which makes little sense at all. I often wonder if the dead know we grieve for them, as the penury of pity only disconcerts ourselves. It is poor comfort, the business of mourning, for what is there really to mourn about excepting our own desire for reconciliation, something which no one, not even the dead, can furnish?”

“Astonishing how tea opens the ears.”

“A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.”

“She deigned to asked me how ice queens reproduce. I grinned, and her mother looked horrified.“We procreate by way of ice cubes, of course. We put them in our nests and let them incubate for the period of about four months, and when the temperature is right, we put them out to roost and let them flake off into billions of snowflakes, rather like tadpoles breaking in droves from their eggs. And that, child,” I said, with a simulacrum of glee, “is how winter is born.”“Does it hurt?”“No more than the approach of Monday does to most of the world. It is a natural process, you understand, but it is dreadful hard work.”

“A heart? Peppone knows where one is to be met with. There is always someone in the black market in need of dying early.”

“We all emerge into this material soup, mix about with the meat and potatoes of life, and then slip away, back to the primordial germination whence we came. Nascence is a strange business: we forget what we were doing only to come forth and continually forget what we were doing perpetually over the course of a lifetime, until it is time to quit this plane through some unseen and ethereal vomitorium, and presumably forget that we had forgotten all over again.”

“There is a very great difference between older and old, the former being desirable and the latter being inevitable.”

“The cern paled, and all the courageous which accompanied him into the conversation was now all done away. He shrunk back, his audacity dwizzening under the teneberous gloom of the giant’s long shadow. He turned to entreat the help of his fellow soldiers with desperate looks, but there was little more than half of the regiments left behind him, all of them unwilling to intervene, and his bowels rumbled, his heart sinking into the grave of conscience, and never had he felt more mistaken in his conduct.”

“The matron glanced at the old man and suppressed a smile. “He is absolutely miserable.” “I enjoy miserable. It gives one a contrast to all the delectabilities of life. But is he housebroken, inpala? He is rather rumpled. He will look well on my ship, but will he wash well? Do professors fray as a general rule? I will not have my ship looking ragged.”“They do tend to fade after a few years of hard use.”

“I know we are supposed to welcome anyone who vows to protect the kingdom, but really, anyone will do anything for a copper these days, and where pride and promises are saleable, expendable men come very cheap indeed.”

“The words ‘when I take you home’ echoed in the captain’s mind, caroming off that private place where all his suspicions and uncertainties slept.”