The Hexologists

Do not neglect to live your life. No cause, no matter how noble, will ever love you.

Do you ever feel as if we are just straightening the picture frames on the walls of a burning house?

Administrators are oblivious and generally get in the way; effective employees learn to work around them. That's how it always is.

I read in the paper yesterday that astronomers believe there are planets out there that don't ride on a rail around a star like our rock does. They call them nomads. These nomads are up there wandering around without a sun to warm them, an orbit to guide them, other worlds to keep them company. They just float around in the dark—aimless, forgotten. These scientists think the galaxy might be full of them. All we ever see are the stars, but the night sky is a crowded graveyard.

That is a Hex of Woe. Its bearer will suffer from insomnia, vertigo, tremors, impotence, styes, tinnitus, and galloping flatulence.

The errant belief that it was the outsider, the alien, the other who was the real danger ignored the fact that most violent crimes were intimate in their origins. A clique was quite content to devour its own.

One way or another, we all address our makers.

But then, what were words but the surrogates of sensation, the emissaries of feeling?

Cake is cake, darling. It’s just a delivery system for frosting.

And it is perfectly all right, my dear Iz, to be afraid of the dark. People who tell you not to be afraid of things are usually the first to get eaten by tigers. Fear helps us to prepare. I say, gather your supplies, arm yourself, and make the dark afraid of you.

a large heart is not light. Even the most cherished burdens must sometimes be laid down.

I divine the truth, Mr. Magnussen, an ideal with which the law appears to have but a passing interest and your publisher a vigorous rivalry. You could be reporting on the plight of the factory worker, or our impotent Parliament, who seem to have confused gridlock with stability, or the worsening carp snow, or any number of other subjects of public interest. Instead, you are lurking behind lampposts and pouncing upon private citizens as if you had any claim to their time.

For years, Magnussen had hounded Iz for the chance to tag along on her investigations. Each time he asked, Isolde had answered she just would rather the criminals get away

Though he was a year younger than Isolde, Warren did not look it, and had been, since adolescence, mistaken for a man laboring toward the promise of retirement.

The alchemist peered back at him with the passionless intensity of a gun barrel

Victor Cholmondeley projected the burly vitality and hypoxic cheer of a mountaineer.

On the one occasion that a vendor was brave enough to ask why he was roaring into his luggage, Warren gaily replied, "Because that's where the dragon is!