“I was going to say the beginning is the good part, when it's all sparks and sparkles, before they are inevitably unmasked as assholes.”

“In all that was to happen, there would be that feeling of inevitability and rightness, and the sense that the universe was conspiring in it. It would be easy.”

“All right," sighed Madrigal. "To the baths, then. To make ourselves shiningly clean." Like vegetable, she thought, before they go in the stew.”

“But he is pretty. God, I hope he's not an asshole. Do you think there's any chance he's both non-orifice and single? I mean, seriously. What are the chances?”

“Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.”

“She'd heard the word before; seraphim were some high order of angels, at least according to the Christian mythos, for which Brimstone had utter contempt, as he did for all religion. 'Humans have gotten glimpses of things over time,' he'd said. 'Just enough to make the rest up. It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”

“The choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs.""There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf.""That's what they say when they kill our children.”