“All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.”

“To deny the force of divine judgment, then, is to make God less than God, and to make us less than His children. For every father must discipline His children, and paternal discipline is itself a mercy, a fatherly expression of love.”

“You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.”

“Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.”

“and yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.”

“Gromph closed his eyes and let the logic settle. Jarlaxle was right, of course. Menzoberranzan was a place so wound up in its own intrigue that truth mattered less than suspicion, that suspicion often became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and thus, often created truth. (This applies to all of the world, I believe)”