“And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it. The first man was hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to their augmentation! Drink to--" Then he saw by our faces how much we were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling...”

“Henry,” Robbins said, looking not at him but out to the other side ofthe road, “the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here”—and he pointed to an imaginary place in the road—“all the way to the death ofthat property”—and he pointed to a place a few feet from the first place. “But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter ifyou are not much more darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But ifyou roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns round and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you will need. You will have failed in your part ofthe bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter.”

“What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard who has ever existed?" said Black, with a terrible fury in his face. "Only innocent lives, Peter!""You don't understand!" whined Pettigrew. "He would have killed me, Sirius!""THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED!" roared Black. "DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS, AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE FOR YOU!”

“After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?”“Yeah?”“What are those markings?”His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.”“Did it hurt when they were put on you?”“Yes.”“Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?”“No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.”“How long were you a slave?”“A hundred years.”“How did you get free?”“Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.”“Were you hurt while you were a slave?”Z swallowed hard. “Yes.”“Do you still think about it?”“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made twofists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles.“Does slavery still happen?”“No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.”“What kind of slave were you?”Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said,“I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.”The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight.“Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?”His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on hisshoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle.“Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.”He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely.“No. I know.”

“Resentment always hurts you more than it does the person you resent. While your offender has probably forgotten the offense and gone on with life, you continue to stew in your pain, perpetuating the past. Listen: those who hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment. Your past is past! Nothing will change it. You are only hurting yourself with your bitterness. For your own sake, learn from it, and then let it go.”

“Sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror, any mirror, and you wonder why that nose looks as it does, or those eyes--what is behind them, what depths can they reach. Your flesh, your skin, your lips--you know that that face which you behold is not yours alone but is already something which belongs to those who love it, to your family and all those who esteem you. But a person is more than a face or a bundle of nerves and a spigot of blood; a person is more than talking and feeling and being sensitive to the changes in the weather, to the opinions of people. A person is part of a clan, a race. And knowing this, you wonder where you came from and who preceded you; you wonder if you are strong, as you know those who lived before you were strong, and then you realize that there is a durable thread which ties you to a past you did not create but which created you. Then you know that you have to be sure about who you are and if you are not sure or if you do not know, you have to go back, trace those who hold the secret to your past. The search may not be fruitful; from this moment of awareness, there is nothing more frustrating than the belief that you have been meaningless. A man who knows himself can live with his imperfections; he knows instinctively that he is part of a wave that started from great, unnavigable expanses.”