Children of God (The Sparrow, #2)

by Mary Doria Russell

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

“The noblest kind of retribution,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “is not to become like your enemy.”

“Look keenly at it,” Sean Fein recited quietly, remembering a twelfth-century scholar’s description of the Book of Kells, “and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say all this was the work of angels and not of men.