Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it. Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?' A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.' You enjoy this duty?' He nodded. I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.

That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.