“And so it is with us; we serve as handmaidens to Death. When we are guided by His will, killing is a sacrament.”

“I am a handmaiden of Death. I walk in His dark shadow and do His bidding. Serving Him is my only purpose in this life...”

“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“I wonder if,” Nynaeve said, “we sometimes put the White Tower —as an institution— before the people we serve. I wonder if we let it become a goal in itself, instead of a means to help us achieve greater goals.”“Devotion is important, Nynaeve. The White Tower protects and guides the world.”“And yet, so many of us do it without families,” Nynaeve said. “Without love, without passion beyond our own particular interests. So even while we try to guide the world, we separate ourselves from it. We risk arrogance, Egwene. We always assume we know best, but risk making ourselves unable to fathom the people we claim to serve.”

“THEM AND US For them it was the 6 o'clock news. For us it was reality. They called for pizza. We called for medevacs. Their passion was success. Our passion was survival. They learned of life. We learned of death. They served dinner. We served our coutry. They can forget. We cannot.”

“We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.”