It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

Of course. You get everything from books.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.