So. You get handed a holy sword by an archangel, told to go fight the forces of evil, and you somehow remain an atheist. Is that what you're saying?

...the Stone Table [was] a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team.

Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it, on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke. I could probably stand to learn something from that.

He gave me a severe look over his spectacles and said, as if he thought the words were deadly venom and might kill me, "You are an untidy person.

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell-shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning.

There are some people who will never understand what loyalty means. They could tell you what it was, of course, but they will never know.They will never see it from the inside. They couldn't imagine a world where something like that was real.