Sung Win smiled to himself, enjoying the tension across his shoulders and the way his pulse beat in his veins. All life involved risk.

He would never understand women, he thought. They were life’s great mystery.

It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.

The right words are always there, if a man's sharp enough to see them.

Get up,” she said. “Get up, my lord. If you do not have long, there is still much to do. You must not waste another day, another morning! Take hold of your life with both hands and crush it to you, my lord. You will not have another in this world.

Sometimes, whether a man lived or died was down to luck. He did not know if that realization made him value his own life more or less. If death could come because you chose the wrong door leading out into the sun, perhaps there was no sense to any of it - just the fifth horseman. He shrugged, putting such thoughts aside.

If he had learned anything in manhood, it was that it didn’t matter what other people thought of him—even the ones he respected. In the end, he would patch together a life, with its sorry errors and its triumphs, just as they had.

There was no destiny in life, nothing beyond what a man could take and hold for himself.