One final bit of advice. The next time a senior administrator of the CIA tells you she has a national-security crisis Leave the bullshit in Cambridge.

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

Coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.

Knowledge is power, and the right knowledge lets man perform miraculous, almost godlike tasks.

Life is filled with difficult decisions, he thought. And winners are those who make them.

Langdon whispered to Vittoria. 'Ever fire anything other than a tranquilizer gun?' 'Don't you trust me?' 'Trust you? I barely know you.' Vittoria frowned. 'And here I thought we were newly-weds.

It is always darkest before the dawn.