“There was a stricken conscience of public guilt and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building which we had accepted or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.”

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

“We’ was such a comforting word. ‘We’ meant weathering things together. Camaraderie. Safety in numbers. All the things that Havoc and Jade and Perch had talked about. And yet Mosca had seen all these things collapse within an hour of the dusk bugle.”

“when we do what is known to be wrong, two negative things happened. First, we feel guilt and this guilt eats away confidence. Second, other people sooner or later find out and lose confidence in us”

“Something struck us as wrong, which only meant that we had not thought of it ourselves.”

“This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.”

“This is what we had become, after the first symbiotic year of our living together: a couple who needed another couple to be around.”