David Lamar

“For, in those centuries, when numbers of children died in the cradle and half the women in childbirth, when epidemics ravaged adult life, when wounds were but rarely cured, and sores did not heal, when the Church’s teaching was ceaselessly directed towards a consciousness of sin, when the statues in the sanctuaries showed worms gnawing at corpses, when each one carried throughout his life the spectre of his own decomposition before his eyes and the idea of death was habitual, natural and familiar, to be present at a man’s last breath was not, as it is for us, a tragic reminder of our common destiny.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they stared at each other across a room...My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“Love and hate have just a knife's edge between them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter