I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

But she was radiant, and she was mine; she was as she'd always been, and I told her so silently with all my power, that she was lovely as my earliest memory of her when she had had her old fancy clothes still, and she would dress up so carefully and carry me on her lap in the carriage to church.

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.

Finally those you love are simply ... those you love.

Ashlar: "I have learned to live with a profound loneliness. I forget about it for years and years. Then it surfaces, the desire to be placed in context by somebody else. The desire to be known, understood, evaluated morally by a sophisticated mind. That was always the lure of the Talamasca, from the beginning, that I could go there and confide in my scholars, that we would talk late into the night.(...) Human beings very seldom survive without that kind of exchange, communication. Love.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.