"I will be succinct, eschewing vainglorious hyperbole."
"It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be...infuriating."
"Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?"
"By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the “carnival arts,” and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank’s larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early “dramatic training” with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade’s fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement."
"While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it."
"And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart."
"Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us."