"I felt like a person again, instead of a walking bundle of bad decisions."
"As a student of history I understand the fleeting nature of any given way of life. What may seem to its occupants to be a state of unalterable stability will soon—in months, years, decades, or centuries—give way to chaos. Barbarian hordes will invade. Disease-ridden ships will arrive. Nuclear weapons will be deployed. When the way of life in question is my own, however, my perspective becomes markedly less academic."
"Trust was essential to a well-functioning unit, and lying was antithetical to trust."
"You may also be wondering, incidentally, why my comrades and I aren’t preparing to defend our convent—or, better yet, to flee. Our rationale is complicated—partly ideological and partly pragmatic. The troops dispatched by the Delegarchs will not only vastly outnumber and outgun us but will also consist entirely of young people. Such has been the practice in warfare for millennia, the carcasses of a civilization’s youth serving as gruesome prophylactics for the aged ruling classes in their perpetual battle against any and all threats to their own desperately held power. Our order believes that to fight against such youthful troops is to validate the logic of empire, and so—not in passivity but in protest—we lay down our weapons (so to speak; we don’t actually have any weapons)."
"Once we arrive in the afterlife, if it exists, we will never cease to be. Our post-mortal existence will stretch on forever. I don’t know. The thought of such an infinite future leaves me feeling claustrophobic. A little short of breath. With no exit and no end, eternal life could be a very small cage indeed."
"“Nevertheless,” he went on, standing the envelope back up on its edge. “I would ask you, are the forces of indifference any less sinister than those of hooded cultists bound together by arcane oaths to uphold ancient and bloody agendas? I would say no, mainly because I don’t believe these secret cabals really exist. Indifference, though, is all too real. Indifference snuffs out idealism and enables tyrants. Indifference consigns millions of fascinating men and women to the dustbin of history. Indifference swallows people like you and me into its gaping maw, never to release us. That’s what we’re fighting against here, Daniel.”"
"You see, I’ve tried philosophy, but philosophy feels far too cautious, too bound by human logic. And then there’s religion—God, angels, sin—but none of that has ever appealed to me. Fiction masquerading as cosmology is what it feels like to me, and all too self-important, too self-serious."