“Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.”

“The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weaknes...”

“All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence wh...”

“Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.”

“There are some for whom the good of mankind is their primary concern, and others who basically put their own considerations before everyone else. I was among the latter.”

“Noblest. Bravest. What rot. There was no bravery in buying oneself out of difficulty.”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“Love is a force unto itself, sayyidi. For love, people consider the unthinkable...and often achieve the impossible. I would not sneer at its power.”

“Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellectbetter because they alone give promise of final success.”

“Perhaps not willingly, but pain can make a man do things he wouldn't willingly do.”

“Sometimes you must behave like a tunnel! If a formidable mountain is on your way, thrust through it!”