Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.

Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.

Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear?Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feetdeep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the longnight, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little childrenare born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt andhungry, and the white walkers move through the woods

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

Confidence is what we get when we take fear, face it and replace it.

The desert became grim, dark and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.

To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

I'm like my mother, she thought, I search my joy for signs of sorrow ahead.

As they gently lowered it into the earth, all stared silently at the coffin but one: a young woman of twenty-five who glanced absentmindedly into the distance where an unknown figure stood – watching, waiting, his face buried in the shadow of his hat. Whether by intuition or paranoia she could not tell, but the presence of the man troubled her and her eyes were fixed on his motionless body and would not stir. Tourists rarely came to a town as small and uneventful as theirs, let alone to visit a funeral where they did not introduce themselves and only beheld the spectacle from afar.

He needed the warmth of the sun to take away the chill of foreboding that grew in him.

He liked murder. Murder and long walks had been two of his favorite things when he was younger.