“There is so much morbo festering between these two sides that they would have to employ a very powerful priest to exorcise the phenomenon, always presuming that they wanted to. It's not merely that they hate each other with an intensity that can truly shock the outsider, but that each encounter between them always has a new ingredient. This is the essence of morbo. It feeds off itself and keeps growing until it becomes a self-regulating and self-perpetuating organism, like some sinister creature from a science fiction fantasy.”

“Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced.”

“I let the wound fester and grow, feeding on the silence between us. I learned then a crucial truth: that a relationship between two people can be judged by the list of things unspoken between them.”

“In a word, the Self has two qualities: it is unjust in itself since it makes itself the centre of everything; it is inconvenient to others since it would enslave them; for each self is the enemy, and would like to be the tyrant of all others. You take away its inconvenience, but not its injustice, and so you do not render it lovable to those who hate injustice; you render it lovable only to the unjust, who do not any longer find in it an enemy. And thus you remain unjust, and can please only the unjust”

“The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.”

“The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.”