He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old. - Guy Gavriel Kay

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…
Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

His choice here, no one else to blame. Sometimes, he thought, life was easier when you had people to stop you. Maybe that was something parents were good for.