“He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place. and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could findin the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”

“If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.”

“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”

“Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?”He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.“No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right—that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.”

“A gentleman might have stopped then. She had climaxed, and she was still a virgin, and he was probably a beast for wanting to make love to her fully, but he simply couldn't...not.She was his.But not, he was coming to realize, quite as much as he was hers.”