“The battle, if you could call it that, lasted no more than a few seconds.”

“You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day. It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.”

“Through their deeds, the dead of battle have spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could. But we can only honor them by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which they gave a last full measure of devotion. ”

“Can I stay with the other angel, then? The blond."Thane? "Why?" he demanded."Don't take this the wrong way, but I like him better than I like you."There was a right way to take that statement? Honesty was to be commended, and yet Zacharel suddenly battled an inexplicable need to shake her. "You cannot know who you like better. You only spent a few seconds in his company.""Sometimes a few seconds is all it takes."-Annabelle and Zacharel”

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Call me once you’ve taken care of that hard-on in your pants, so you’ll last longer than ten seconds when we fuck.”