"“What brought all this on?” ”The higher order edition of the Pattern I encountered in the Jewel, actually. There were aspects of it I simply could not understand. This led to considerations of chaos theory, then to Menninger and all the others for its manifestations in consciousness.” “Any conclusions?” “I am wiser therefor.” “I mean, concerning the Pattern.” “Yes. Either it possesses a certain element of irrationality itself, like living things, or it is an intelligence of such an order that some of its processes only seem irrational to lesser beings. Either explanation amounts to the same thing from a practical standpoint.”"

"A crown does not automatically make a person daggerproof."

"Every time I complained about politics, here, in Amber, back in the States on the Shadow Earth, there was the automatic corollary of considering the way I’d manage situations if I were in charge."

""So, then, you understand?" Not in the way you mean, sport, Rainbow Six thought, before responding. "Yes, I suppose I do, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich." "How did you find my name? Who told you?" "Sergey Nikolay'ch and I are old friends." "Ah," Popov managed to observe without fainting. His own agency had betrayed him? Was that possible? Then it was as if Clark had read his mind. "Here," John said, handing over the sheaf of photocopies. Your evaluations are pretty good." Not good enough," Popov replied, failing to recover from the shock of viewing items from a file that he had never seen before."

""Chavez here, I just dropped two." The excitement of the moment masked the shame of how easy it had been. This was pure murder."

""This is some place," one voice said. "Look at these trees, man." "Yeah, big, ain't they?" "What kind of trees?" a third asked. "The kind somebody can hide behind and shoot your ass from!" a more serious voice pointed out."

""We're going to be close to overloading the aircraft," Harrison warned. "That's why it's got two engines, son," the Marine pointed out."

"Clark: You get a nap. The rest of the team arrives in about half an hour." Ding: "The rest of what team?" Clark: Everybody who can move and shoot, son."

""And what will your neighbors think of all this?" Popov asked, with a lighthearted smile. What the hell were these people talking about? "What neighbors?" Killgore asked. [...] What neighbors? Popov thought again. They could see the roofs of farmhouses and buildings not ten kilometers away, well lit by the morning sun. What did they mean, what neighbors? They spoke of a radiant future with wild animals everywhere, but not of people. Did they plan to purchase all the nearby farms? Even Horizon Corporation didn't have that much money, did it? This was a settled, civilized area. The farms nearby were large prosperous ones owned by people of comfortable private means. Where would they go? Why would they leave? And yet again, the question leaped into Popov's mind. What is this all about?"

""Joe!" a happy voice said out of his field of vision. He looked up to see a fortyish man with a beaming smile. "Patrick!" Popov responded, standing, going over to shake hands. It's been a long time. Very long, as he'd never met this particular chap before, though they exchanged greetings like old friends."

"Ireland would not turn into a Marxist country, for all their wishes. The list of such nations was very thin now, though across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country—that Russia had been too far backward to make those wonderful ideas work. That was enough to bring an ironic smile and a shake of the head. He'd once been a part of the organization called the Sword and Shield of the Party. He'd been through the Academy, had sat through all the political classes, learned the answers to the inevitable examination questions and been clever enough to write down exactly what his instructors wanted to hear, thus ensuring high marks and the respect of his mentors—few of whom had believed in that drivel any more than he had, but none of whom had found within themselves the courage to speak their real thoughts. It was amazing how long the lies had lasted, and truly, Popov could remember his surprise when the red flag had been pulled down from its pole atop the Kremlin's Spasskaya Gate. Nothing, it seemed, lived longer than a perverse idea."

"It would forever be regarded as a very bad shot. Half a second later, the 7-mm bullet struck the subject six inches below the sternum."

"Bear, this is Six," Clark called on the radio. "Bear copies, Six, over." "We execute in five minutes." "Roger that, we party in five."

"Carol Brightling: Who did the takedown? George Winston: Well– [...] What did the news say? Carol: Local cops, Vienna police SWAT team, I guess. George: Well, I suppose they learned up on how to do it. Carol: The Austrians? Who'd they learn it from? George: Somebody who knows how, I guess."

"These anti-terror groups all looked pretty much the same, but that was to be expected, since they all trained to do the same thing and worked out of the same international manual—first promulgated by the English with their Special Air Service commandos, then followed by the German GSG-9, and then the rest of Europe, followed by the Americans—down to the black clothing, which struck Popov as theatrical, but they all had to wear something, and black made more sense than white clothing, didn't it?"

"On the way to the range, they passed Chavez, Price, and the rest, coming out with their MP-10s, joking with one another as they passed. Evidently everyone had had a good morning on the range. "Ach," Weber snorted, "anyone can shoot at five meters!""

""We have thought that one through," Hans assured his guest. Popov wondered briefly about that. But he'd be surprised if they even boarded an aircraft, much less got it to Africa. The problem with "missions" like this one was that no matter how carefully most of its parts had been considered, this chain was decidedly no stronger than its weakest link, and the strength of that link was all too often determined by others, or by chance, which was even worse."

"They were either very brave or very foolish to go to that country, Popov thought. [...] Bokassa had killed his way to the top, as had so many African chiefs of state, before dying, remarkably, of natural causes—so the papers said, anyway, you could never really be sure, could you?"

"The man had to be tense, Popov knew. Betrayal was how most of the people like Fürchtner got caught, and though Dmitriy was known and trusted by them, you could only be betrayed by someone whom you trusted, a fact known to every covert operator in the world."

""Thanks, Doc." Chavez hefted the book for weight and headed out the door. The Enraged Outlook: Inside the Terrorist Mind was the title. It wouldn't hurt to understand them a little better, though he figured the best thing about the inside of a terrorist's mind was a 185-grain 10-mm hollow-point bullet entering at high speed."

"Because of a random event—bad luck. A hell of a thing to tell someone who'd just lost a husband. Cause of death, bad luck."

"Popov: It went much as I had expected. They were foolish—really rather amateurish, despite all the training we gave them back in the eighties. I told them to feel free to rob the bank as a cover for the real mission– John Brightling: Which was? Popov: To be killed."

"Henriksen: The commander on the scene makes that decision, based on his training, experience, and expertise. Then, Henriksen didn't go on, people like you second-guess the hell out of him for the next couple weeks."

"TV Anchor: But who decides when it's necessary?"

"Henriksen: You only use deadly force when necessary—but when it's necessary, you do use it."

"One of them came outside and lit a pipe—how very Swiss! Popov thought. The bugger probably climbs mountains for personal entertainment, too."

""Oso backs us up, but I don't think we'll have much use for him on this trip." Julio Vega had become their heavy-machine gunner, slinging a laser-sighted M-60 7.62-mm machine gun for really serious work, but there wasn't much use for that now—and wouldn't be, unless everything went totally to hell."

"Eddie: What's the plan if the opposition just starts shooting out of hand? Ding: Tell Louis, two flashbangs at the front door, four more inside, and we blow in like a tornado. Eddie: Our body armor– Ding: Won't stop a seven-six-two Russian. I know. Nobody ever said it was safe, Eddie."

"The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it."

"A few of the rooms into which I looked held walls in which there had once ticked a thousand or more clocks of various kinds, and though all were dead now, their chimes silenced and their hands corroded at hours that would never come again, I thought them good omens for one who sought the Atrium of Time."

"Love is a long labor for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not."

"We’ll both be glad of the company, like the undertaker remarked to the ghost."

"“You have bettered yourself,” he said, making such a low bow that the tassel of his cap swept the carpet. “You may recall that I invariably affirmed you would. Honesty, integrity, and intelligence cannot be kept down.” “We both know that nothing is easier to keep down,” I said. “By my old guild, they were kept down every day.”"

"The sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground."

"When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize."

"There was a cook who so despised the armigers and exultants for whom he prepared food that, in order that he should never have to bear the indignity of their reproaches, he did everything with a feverish perfection. He was eventually made chief of the cooks of that wing."

"There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?"

"Because the prehistoric cultures endured for so many chiliads, they have shaped our heritage in such a way as to cause us to behave as if their conditions obtained today."

"“Why did you kill Thecla?” “I did not. Your error lies in thinking I am at the bottom of everything. No one is...Not I, or Erebus, or any other."

"You were a danger to them unless you were terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted. A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster, alternately purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and nothing."

"There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity."

"By each step in war the winner loses."

"Each rider seemed to have a personal spell; and it was easy to see, as I watched their numbers shrink under the bombardment, how such primitive minds come to believe in their charms, for the survivors could not but feel their thaumaturgy had saved them, and the rest could not complain of the failure of theirs."

"Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes almost more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced but defiled."

"“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of winning.” I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations winning consisted of disentangling oneself."

"Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something. You are yourself what you call a man of science, so I talk of science to you."

"Resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because a man whets his own edges on them."

"In a fable made in the earliest morning of our race, a man sold his shadow and found himself driven out everywhere he went. No one would believe that he was human" "Did this man ever regain his shadow, Master Ash?" "No. But for a time he traveled with a man who had no reflection."

"Surely I have no complaint of you, though you must have many of me. One I shall not deserve. It shall not be said that I did not do what I might to undo the harm I have done."

"It often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food [...] are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own."