It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

We call people rats, who desert a sinking ship; but in some cases the rat has the wisdom of the situation.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?

The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.

And death? I don’t fear death. I dread the absence of it.

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I’m also a realist.

I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don’t know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.