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“Where my wife once had her estates…”
“They serve a certain kind of dumpling…”
“Deplore the tyrants and conquerors all we like, mouth along with the platitudes with the rest of the hypocrites, but do you think, alone in the darkness, men dream of doing good?”
Perhaps the lesson is … we can’t ever really change who we are.”
Duke Michael smiled. “Show me a man who regrets nothing and I’ll show you a man who’s achieved nothing.”
“How can one achieve greatness,” he murmured, “without great adversaries against whom to test oneself?”
Did her eyes flicker from his face for a moment, down towards his feet, and back? “I cannot help but think you would make an even more formidable ally.”
Alex fixed Cardinal Zizka with her eye. “But it’s going to fucking cost you.” There was a silence, as the two of them glared at one another. Then Cardinal Zizka gave the faintest smile. “God has deep pockets,” she said.
“The torments of the damned … would differ from my usual mornings … I’ve no idea.”
“What is it … with paintings of demons … and the anus?” “Says more about the painters than the demons, I daresay. Some people pay good money for that.”
“No matter how you fight, you can’t beat time. It lays low every Empire, topples every tyrant.”
“Perhaps evil men can do good, still.”
“If they do enough, don’t they become good men?”
“It’s not what you’ve done that makes you good or bad. It’s what you do next.”
kiss, when you know it’s leading nowhere … what’s it worth? It’s just a reminder of what you don’t have. The first sentence of a story that’ll never be told.
Like pox on a plague victim, the prostitutes are the symptom, not the sickness. They merely answer a desire. It is the scale of that desire, of that sickness, that concerns me.
“Hypocrisy, Master Caruso. The pretence that you are something better, nobler, holier than you are … is surely the worst dishonesty of all. It is that of which I disapprove.”
