“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”

“...miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to...”

“Lacey, you don't understand." He felt weightless, benumbed. He had nothing to fight with, not even a blade. "We're totally unarmed. I've seen what he can do." "There are weapons more powerful than guns and knives," the woman replied. Her face held no fear, only a sense of purpose. "It is time for you to see it." "See what?" "What you came to find," said Lacey. "The Passage.”

“Events can seem random while you're living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more?”

“For you, hunting the Twelve isn't an answer. It's a question. Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving? What would God want from me, if there is a God? The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us.”

“What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?”

“[...]and yet wasn't there something about [vampires] that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness -- what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal?”