Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went. - Stephen Baxter

Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”

He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.

Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.