"The young curate, already pale to the lips, rolled his eyes up until only the whites showed, and began to pray in a trembling, feeble voice. Raised in an ecclesiastical society, where the tenets of the Faith are never argued, having long ago all been decided upon, he had never before been exposed to any difference of opinion on such holy matters. It was, indeed, for him an earth-shaking experience even to be listening to these hideous and pandemonial hallucinations, these nauseously original ideas, each of which gnawed at the roots of his sanity like a voracious worm, until the poor fellow felt his reason began to totter and the foundations of his faith began to shudder and reel."

“Knowing that you possess a talent is half the battle in mastering it.”

“Sheb being a theocracy was naturally ruled by the priests, and priests are naturally bigoted in favor of their own narrow creed, and intolerant of differences of opinion on theological matters. It’s really too bad that things are that way, but there you are: you have to take the world the way it is, not the way you would prefer it to be.”

“The expression on his features was one of a pained disapproval, similar to that of a gentleman of the cloth when observing the young folks behaving like young folks.”

““If one doesn’t learn from one’s unhappy experiences,” he wisely observed, “what’s the point of all that suffering?”

“Chan’s heart knew only greed, but there was within him enough intelligence to wonder before a man who could see all the uselessness of life, and still exult in the possessing of it.”

“Yes, a woman makes a fine weapon in capable hands...slim and supple as a sword blade...and a blade to which no man’s armor is completely proof.”