You can't call your life your own: and in return you have safety, if it's worth having at the price you pay.

They're all so much afraid of the Council that they're not afraid of anything else.

A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.

You know how you let yourself think that everything will be alright if you can only go to certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

[One} who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.

You're trying to eat grass that isn't there. Why don't you give it a chance to grow?

Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not

Bigwig: "I can't think why he didn't convince Threarah."Hazel: "Because Threarah doesn't like anything he hasn't thought of for himself.

Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women and even the most foolish women are wise about men.

My characters have to talk, or they're out. They audition in early scenes. If they can't talk, they're given less to do, or thrown out.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

God is far more interested in what you are than who you are.

Because I know that time is always time and place is always place and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. I rejoice that things are as they are.

To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

I'm older, and I'm better. I'm not old, but I'm older and wiser.

Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem.

I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash-and it may be well that we become so hardened.