A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on

He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.

[...] so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it?" "Oh, yes, it's there," she said. "It's there because we put it there.