“Far be in from me to dictate how you should assuage your guilt. Do you have a lot of it?"She bit his good shoulder. "You're about to find out."She toppled them both off the bench and onto the mat. "Well, ouch. I take it guilt doesn't bring out your gentler side.”

“I’m your uncle?”Oh. So that’s what was bothering him. Izzy could have done a lot of things at this moment to assuage Eibhear’s annoyance. A lot of things.She didn’t do any of them.Instead she said, “Well…you are my uncle.” She brushed a bit of nonexistent dirt off his bare shoulder. “And I was your ward until years later when you finally had your vile, dirty uncle way with me.””Izzy.”

“How far can your imagination take you? I don't know. That's up to you, but I think you should find out.”

“Doing your duty is having no sense of guilt about what you are doing.”

“It is not any crime you have committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them - it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your "selfishness," weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence; fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.”

“It doesn't take any effort to dream. It's a lot easier than looking at the problems in front of you and figuring out what you're going to do about them. But all you're doing is putting your problems up on a shelf for later, right? That doesn't make them go away.”