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“And I was quite the beauty myself before life’s buffets wore down my looks.” The self-same older lads chuckled. Old men’s jokes, all about how fine things used to be.
Savour the little moments, son, that’s my advice. They’re what life is. All the things that happen while you’re waiting for something else.
I’ve heard Black Dow wants you dead.” Calder tried not to show he’d been thrown by the shift of subject and failed. “Who says?” “Black Dow.”
But he’d long ago learned that most men love nothing better than to be listened to. Especially powerful men.
“Once a man’s in the ground he’s just mud. Mud and stories. And the stories and the men don’t often have much in common.”
He’d done the right thing. Maybe. Or maybe there’s no such thing.
What is love anyway, but finding someone who suits you? Someone who makes up for your shortcomings? Someone you can work with. Work on.
Knowledge is the root of power,
Life only rolls one way and it ain’t always the way we’d like.
Patience, his father would have told him, patience.
“You have to look forward,” she remembered her father telling her, as he plucked another of her pieces from the squares board. “Concentrate on what you can change.”
Always do the right thing sounds an easy rule to stick to. But when’s the right thing the wrong thing? That’s the question.
“Patience is as fearsome a weapon as rage. More so, in fact, ’cause fewer men have it.”
Bravery is being scared, and doing it anyway.”
Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Obvious, perhaps. Something that everyone knows. Something that everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.
Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.
It’s in the nature of men to forget.
All you can do is take each day as it comes. Try and do the best you can with what you’re given. You won’t always do the right thing, but you can try. And you can try to do the right thing next time. That, and stay alive.”
“Life is, basically, fucking shit.” “Best to keep your expectations low. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“You find out what a man really is, when he’s facing death.”
And what is love anyway, but finding someone who suits you? Someone who makes up for your shortcomings? Someone you can work with. Work on.
