So, I poisoned his coffee this morning and watched him drink it.

As Roran watched, the man's arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward.

I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine.

Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.Even now I curse the day__nd yet, I think,Few come within the compass of my curse,__herein I did not some notorious ill,As kill a man, or else devise his death,Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,Set deadly enmity between two friends,Make poor men's cattle break their necks;Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,And bid the owners quench them with their tears.Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful thingsAs willingly as one would kill a fly,And nothing grieves me heartily indeedBut that I cannot do ten thousand more.