The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic

The old man said that the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought.

He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man’s desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey.

He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.

She watched him, not unkindly. She smiled. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

he repeated what his father had once told him, that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.

The man leaned back, he looked up at the boy and smiled. Do not misunderstand me, he said. The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one

He died. When they carried him out of there I thought how peculiar it would of seemed to him if he could of seen it. It did to me and it wasnt even me. Dying aint in people’s plans, is it?

That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.