"First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?"

"We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics."

"How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?"

"She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as women judge men — not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, the strength of their soul, their compassion, and — ah, this above all — their conversation."

"What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?"

"His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life."

"When we intended to enjoy being cruel, we must transform our victim into either a beast or a god."

"The vision of the gods without the power of the gods. What a terrible gift.A glorious gift."

"You never needed anybody. If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth. Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other."

"She did love him, you know... It was a selfish, possessive love, but it was all she knew how to give."

"I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone."

"What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult."

"They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer."

"Keeping secrets was the beginning of freedom."

"She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind."

"Adolescents never understand that the best way to avoid notice is to behave normally."

"We were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners."

"Even the most "Rational" people — the ones who claimed not to have a religion — were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal."

"There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing."

"This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard."

"Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him."

"There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore."

"He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was."

"You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you."

"I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions."

"I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me."

"You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else."

"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."