Blood and Ice

People are always doing things for my sake and strangely enough, I'm the one who suffers for it.

Regardless of how black the page, he had always managed to turn it and move on to a new chapter in his life.

the odds are good, but the goods are odd

when they're bathed in blood everyday you can't expect them to rise from it stainless the next morning.

jockey was whipping it mercilessly, but the horse was falling farther behind every second. And the black one, a frisky colt, was simply holding its own, hoping to make it to the finish line without any greater exertion. Nightingale’s Song, however, was not spent at all; indeed, the horse seemed only

And his prospects … they were altered in the Crimea. Everyone who went there was changed by it, everyone who survived was damaged. It was impossible not to be.” She brushed the mist from her hair with the back of one hand. “You cannot bathe in blood every night,” she said, “and emerge the next morning unstained.” Michael

I know,” she said. “And isn’t that strange? We’ve come to a place where the sun never sets, but it offers so little in the way of warmth.” Michael

Wherever humans had set foot, the carnage had been so brutal, so extraordinary, and so quick that the very thing making the killers rich was nearly eradicated in a hundred years’ time.

Every species, from the blue whale to the fruit fly, will struggle, with every fiber of its being, to preserve its own existence. And the more I studied them, even the single-celled diatoms, the more beautiful they all appeared to me. Life is a miracle—an absolute fucking miracle—in every form it takes, and I just never felt right again about taking any of it unnecessarily.

The odds are good,” she’d said, surveying all the men, “but the goods are odd.