“God In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled catTo him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,And he would weigh the heavier on those after.Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealthIs but his cunning to make death more hard.Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.And he has made the market for your beautyToo poor to buy, although you die to sell.Only that he has never heard of sleep;And when the cats come out the rats are sly.Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawnBut he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lostOut of us, but it is as hair of us,And only in the hush no wind stirs it.And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.The fingers shut on voices that pass through,Where blind farewells are taken easily ....Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

“The rat turned his glowing eyes on him, and Gregor was shocked by what he saw there. The intelligence, the deadliness, and, most surprisingly, the pain. This rat was not like Fangor and Shed. He was much more complicated and much more dangerous. For the first time in the Underland, Gregor felt completely out of his league. If he fought this rat, he wouldn't stand a change. He would lose. He would be dead.”

“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.Behind me, I heard the same man asking:"For God's sake, where is God?"And from within me, I heard a voice answer:"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”

“... We can't control the turn of events. All we can do is ask God for power in your life to go through whatever may be ahead. He has not promised us easy ways out of our problems, but He has promised His strength when we need it to go through adversity”

“Why?" he asked instead. "Why do such things when my death would have benefited you far more?" Yhalen bent over his knees, resting forehead on his forearm, perhaps not willing to answer, or not able to, strange creature that he was. "Is that the way your people think?" he asked finally, as he turned his head to peer up at Bloodraven through the thick fall of the hair around his face. "That death is more beneficial than life?”

“The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.”