"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)."
"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."
"Something in Karen’s tone triggered my inner contrarian, and I found myself disagreeing with her before I could quite say why."
"Of course, I told myself that the only reason I was experiencing anything unusual was because I was expecting to experience something unusual, primed as I’d been by Sérgio’s wild account of his own relationship with these texts."
"I felt like a person again, instead of a walking bundle of bad decisions."
"“I know what you mean,” I said. “I remember a couple of years ago—” But Sérgio held up a hand to stop me. “I appreciate the gesture, Daniel,” he said. “I really do. But there’s a certain kind of existential disappointment you can only experience after you’ve passed the midpoint of your life, and right now I’m not sure if I can listen with much sympathy to your story of youthful travails. I hope you’ll understand.”"
"“I wish I could tell you, Daniel,” he said, “that the reason nobody else has seen this document is because a sinister cabal—the Illuminati, maybe, or the Rosicrucians—has worked for decades to suppress it, and that I only obtained it myself by deciphering a series of obscure clues I found concealed within the world’s most treasured works of art, clues that led me to a labyrinthine archive below a centuries-old cathedral, where I snatched this document from its malevolent keepers at great risk to my own life. “But the truth is, I found this document in a box of garbage, and nobody else knows about it because nobody else cares.”"