“He's a Sentinel. An angel created to hunt and punish other angels. He was designed and built to feel no emotion, to function almost like a machine. One mission, one purpose, no deviations. But he's deviated a lot over the years. Now more so than ever before. And he's paid the price. He's paying it even now.”

“So, he feels now, that he doesn't have to try. And you want him more than you ever have before.”

“Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”

“He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman.”

“Angel and devil,” he said. “One is but a shade of the other.”

“Each time they meet, they have more to discuss, and so they talk, quietly revealing themselves with and without language, their eyes moving like their hands over the plates of food between them....As he walks away from these visits, his heart almost bursts from happiness and regret. He would give anything to have made different choices. He is making those choices now, but he is forty-six years old. Sometimes he is haunted by the thought that it's all come too late. Other times he thinks, No, what is happening now could never have happened before; I was too young and too fearful. The paradox fascinates him--as the old loyalties desiccate and the danger intensifies, he feels lighter and younger than he has in years.”