Fine, fine, I’ll indulge in this ‘socializing’ thing you always rave about.

Legendary manners there, Karim,” she commented, her voice calm. “Your mother teach you?”

“I was taught the advantage of surprise,” he responded as he walked over to her massive desk.

Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them.

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

Like a firework, a person’s life flashed brightest right before expiration.

Ice upon ice, and yet, inside, she melted and mourned all the same.