"Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man."

"I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them." "A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

"Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?" "Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers." "Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?"

"How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?"

"Here's my throat. I carry no weapon. You could have killed me at any time, even when I knew you were my enemy. Why did you need to deceive me into trusting you first? Were you afraid that death wouldn't bother me enough, unless I felt betrayed?"

"Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while."

"I will not be tamed, only persuaded. I will not be coerced or led blindly or tricked or bullied - I am willing only to be convinced. If you don't trust your own basic goodness enough to tell me what you're trying to do... Then you're confessing your own moral weakness and I'll never serve you."

"Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?"

"Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be."

"You think my apology means I'm weak. But it doesn't. It means I am trying to learn how to be strong."

"I was forgetting how it really was, I was remembering it through common, ordinary eyes, I was remembering it as the boy I was before, but now I remember that it wasn't me being weak or me being naked, or anything else that I should be ashamed of."

"I have no way of knowing that your story is not true — but you have no way of knowing that my story isn't true. So I will choose the one that I love. I will close the one that, if it's true, makes this reality one worth living in. I'll act as if the life I hope for is real life, and the life that disgusts me — your life, your view of life — is the lie."

"It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then... Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions."

"Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too."

"Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause."

"How does he do it? How does he master people without bluster or bullying? How does he make people fear him or love him, not in spite of his ruthlessness but because of it?"

"We are all fools when one wise man appears."

"Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do."

"Will I be coming to you as husband or a child? A partner or a student?"

"Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will — will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth."

"If I wanted to doubt then I could doubt endlessly. But at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in."

"You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear."

"The others are even more likely to obey their god. Which is? It dangles between their legs."

"Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist. Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it."

"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."

"Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together."

"You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told. So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person."

"I interpreted all you did as weakness — but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it."

"Doesn't love show its face when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for the loved one's sake alone?"

"I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives."

"Maybe he's growing up. Or maybe he just needed the right circumstances to discover the best in himself."

"Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are."

"Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then."

"I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female."

"The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away."

"Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do."

"Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again."

"Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable."

"That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival."

"May the day when you need courage never come. Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come."

"You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them."

"Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever."

"He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more."

"What cannot be healed has been healed. What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven."

"Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in."

"Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does."

"Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking."

"I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way."

"I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later."