Robert Jackson Bennett quotes:

Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.

Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.

I don't think we can build much of a future,' says Shara, 'without knowing the truth of the past. It's time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.

Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.

Oh, propriety," says Mrs Benjamin. "We're always so concerned with propriety. Even in total madness, we still stick to our hierarchies and chains of command.

The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.

The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.

Just because you won the War doesn't mean you can do whatever you like!' says Yaroslav. 'And just because we lost it doesn't mean you can strip us of everything we value!

...history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.

History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.

We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present - do we not?

I wish I did not know parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.

I don't have the time or the energy to hate," says Shara. "I only wish to understand. People are what they are.

She realized she'd been thinking for years that she would not truly be pleased until she'd checked off this last achievement on her list, but one of the dangers of such thinking is that the event one hopes for never quite lives up to the expectation.

Forgettingis a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn't need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action.