"When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, 'I don't hate you.'She called me an effing liar and said, 'Hate makes the world go around. Envy, lust and hate.'I stopped hating anyone the day when I realized hating can't restore to me anything that's lost."

"There are different kinds of darkness,” Rhys said. I kept my eyes shut. “There is the darkness that frightens, the darkness that soothes, the darkness that is restful.” I pictured each. “There is the darkness of lovers, and the darkness of assassins. It becomes what the bearer wishes it to be, needs it to be. It is not wholly bad or good."

"People have a tendency to shrink the boundaries of complex problems to fit into their back pocket and then, sure enough, grumble that their problems follow wherever they go."

"It’s very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves."