"If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe."

"If you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault. We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them."

"Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last."

"Even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help."

"But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost."

"You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything."

"People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else."

"For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done."

"Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst."

"Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you're living forever for. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you're no good to anyone here, not even yourselves."

"I had never believed I had a soul until then, when it laid bare a hurt more deep than any part of me could bear."

"He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death."

"There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger."

"You are not what you seem. So many people have said that that I'm beginning to think that's precisely how I do seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I'm not?"

"I immediately felt so comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart."

"I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again. Nobody was particularly glad to see me."

"I'm losing Savanna. That's good. No one should own someone else."

"Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope."

"There must be a special place in hell reserved for you. I've been to hell. It's a better place than this."

"I want to see the king. Wonderful. I'm glad for you. Why are you so glad? Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant."

"It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent."

"I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew."

"She did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her."

"You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love."

"A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it."

"When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood."

"Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult."

"Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing."

"He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter."

"A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere."

"Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all."

"They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be."

"To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach."

"Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife."

"There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity."

"[He] looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed."

"You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it."

"I wanted your songs. You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs."

"He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more."

"I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right."

"She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now."

"Only a fool can't be fooled."

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered."

"I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work."

"If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?"

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me."

"Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything. They want to be famous, too."