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“But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?”

“I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,” Rashmika replied.

No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.

He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.

“I thought debate was supposed to be healthy,” she countered.

“It is,” Auger replied, “so long as you don’t disagree with me.”

The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.

“I feel as if I’m missing all the excitement.”

”In my experience,” Tunguska said, making himself a temporary seat, “excitement is always better when it happens to other people.”

“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

“But sometimes a very dangerous one.”

There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.

But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In almost any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light.

The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.

“The Fascists got what they deserved,” Floyd said.

“My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear.”

As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more flexible than others.