Such were the factors that detached Ormus Cama from the ordinary ties of family life. The ties that strangle us, which we call love. Because of the loosening of these ties he became, with all the attendant pain of such becoming, free.

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart’s desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses.

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

The people who kill your children are the people who’s children were playing with your children yesterday. That’s one of the most mysterious things about the 'flip' into hatred. You don’t hate the people who are strangers to you because that creates a kind of indifference; you hate the people who live next door… It’s a curious thing that love and hate are so closely tied together that just a flip of the coin can flip one into the other.

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.