“Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.”

“The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter. He is surprised that the Italia...”

“Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, w...”

“There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not s...”

“The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a...”

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

“That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You f...”

“Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a...”

“I think both Protestants and Catholics have killed the woman for the sake of the mother. (Rubem Alves, p. 201)”

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect fo...”

“Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.”

“Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.”

“A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”