Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

He gathered her black hair in his hand and spread it across his chest like a blessing.

What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It's a great thing, the dance.

I think you ought to follow your heart, the old man said. That's all I've ever thought about anything.

Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God. Amen.

Their eyes seemed filled with expectation and he'd nothing to give. He'd come to take.

They all seemed to be waiting for something. Like passengers in a halted train.

Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear.

The rain stopped falling. They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

He knew the boy lay awake in the night and listened to hear if he were breathing.

You cant go to war without God.

Hey lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

He went in by the back door where the cafeteria had once been. The floorboards creaked underfoot, small life scrabbled away.

Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the winds like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in the old encounters forever unrecorded.

He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other.

This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.

I grew up in a world of men. I thought this would have prepared me to live in a world of men but it did not.

But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.

They entered the cool semidark of the front room with her taking his elbow like one might a blind man or like a blind man might.

He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for.