Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.

Haven't you always been more than yourself? Haven't we all? We are none of us just one thing.

I had felt the shot coming; I hadn't realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?

And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.

Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.