Half of any wedding is a person being handed a role he has only ever watched other people perform.

Nobody needs instructions on how to read a book, and yet someone always wants their name standing in front of it.

Whatever is taken by force gets renamed as improvement, and the new name outlives everyone who refused it.

The hard part was never staying on. It is getting down before the ground decides the timing for you.

Recording the exact moment of everything did not make us better at remembering; it made us worse at denying.

A hole in the ground turns strangers into the only people in the world, briefly and completely.

A mouth shaped for one job explains the whole animal, and usually the island it came from.

A substance becomes poison by arriving where nothing was expecting it, in an amount nobody planned for.

Declining to choose is still choosing, and it always gets counted with whoever agreed.

Going around an obstacle looks like cleverness from the inside and like avoidance from anywhere else.

Small rules are broken constantly, and which breaks get named tells you more about power than the rulebook does.

People say more in a light too weak to read faces by.

What you carried out of the last place is not the trouble; refusing to open it and look is.

You do not have to attack a thing to destroy it; leaving it alone long enough does the same work more quietly.

Inherited advantage always explains itself as merit, and the people holding it are the last to hear the explanation.

A yard full of animals runs on a strict order nobody wrote down and no visitor can see.

Delicacy is expensive to keep up and is mostly admired by people who never had to manage it.

A second signature makes nothing truer; it only spreads the blame for having believed it.

Any definition built out of what a creature lacks can be beaten by one man holding a plucked bird.

Once a thing is pressed onto a page it stops belonging to whoever meant it.