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The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

A flower may be beautiful all on its own, but a person is never truly beautiful unless someone's eyes show him that he is beautiful.

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

There's no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else's morality.

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? If as long as you don't have sex with a lot of people, that's easy. […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God?

You ask yourself "What is love? Am I in love?", when what you should be asking is, "What is not love?", ma petite. What is it that this man does for you that is not done out of love?

Giving up something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn't giving up at all, it's growing up.

"The idea of the feudal system is that the people on the top take care of the needs of those on the bottom, but I have seldom seen it work that way," Wicked said.

"Yeah," I said, "it's like trickle-down economics; it only works if the people at the top are really good, decent people. The system is only as good as the people in power."

He wanted to feed the hunger of his skin. The hunger of his body not so much for orgasm but for that need to be held close and tight, that need we all have to press our nakedness against someone else's.

Samuel smiled at me. "Freedom and fairness are very important to you, aren't they?"

I nodded, and frowned. "They're important to everybody."

He laughed. "Oh, no, Anita, you would be amazed at the number of people who try to give away their freedom at every opportunity. They much prefer that someone else make their decisions."

There comes a point when you just love someone. Not because they're good, or bad, or anything really. You just love them. It doesn't mean you'll be together forever. It doesn't mean you won't hurt each other. It just mean you love them. Sometimes in spite of who they are, and sometimes because of who they are. And you know that they love you, sometimes because of who you are, and sometimes in spite of it.