Quote of the Day

All of the people I hate are dead. Some of them I didn't even kill. Perhaps that's why I'm still angry. Perhaps if it had been my hand on the knife, my eyes the last thing they saw, perhaps then I would be at peace. Perhaps.

I am old. I have outlived my enemies and my purpose. Some people are hard to kill. I'm one of them. Whether that's a blessing or a curse can be difficult to tell. I've lived so often when I should have died. Lived when the better man or woman has stumbled into their grave. Lived when whole towns have burned. Even a city once. Twice. Three times if you count the Port of Lars, though that place catches fire every week.

Everything they said about age was true. That also irks me. All that the wordsmiths wrote, everything the toothless ancients mutter over long-nursed ales, all of it the gods' honest truth. And yet only as decades stacked upon me could I understand it. Same words, different ears.

Age took the beauty that I never recognized when it was mine. It dressed me in this tapestry of scars, and for each one of them sewn silver through my skin a dozen others lie too deep to see. Age stole my grace and left me stumbling on towards a final sunset. It exchanged a confidence born of ignorance for a fear born of knowing that I do not know. And yet. . .and yet. . . it has gifted me a measure of peace I never thought to own. A breath of calm after a storm none of us expected to end. The fires of my rage are old coals now. Quiet, and banked against the coming of night.

I am older than anyone ever imagined I might become. Time's knife has pared away at me, revealing things I thought lost. And still I don't know if what lies ahead will be a death of a thousand cuts, or the gentle easing into the last bed I will ever lay my head in. Or maybe, at the end, the world will remember me again and we shall have a final reckoning.

- MARK LAWRENCE, Daughter of Crows

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About halfway through and it's pretty good thus far!