Day Watch

If age teaches you anything, then one of its lessons is certainly not to hurry if you're already late....

If you have love in you, it's a strength. But if you are in love, it's a weakness.

You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery." "All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more—you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two." "You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself." "So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?" Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion? "Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man.

That's the way it goes sometimes: in order to help your friends, first you have to help your enemy. Better get used to it.

What an unfortunate instrument the guitar is! An instrument of such great nobility, a genuine monarch of music-- reduced to a pitiful lump of wood with six strings, constantly abused by people with no ear and no voice.

And the simple people are trash. A herd of sheep that are good for shearing, but sometimes it's more profitable to slaughter them.

Because love stands above Darkness and Light. Because love is not sex or a shared faith, or "the joint maintenance of a household and the upbringing of children." Because love is also Power. And Light and Darkness, people and Others, morality and law, the Ten Commandments and the Great Treaty have damn all to do with it.

Czech beer in bottles is the corpse of real beer in a glass coffin.

Love was something different. Love was pure delight, a fountain of emotions, sensual delights, and enjoying spending time together.

Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you--these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones.

I had never felt such happiness, not with one man or two or three, never felt this feeling before...this feeling of...completeness? Yes, that was it, completeness! I simply didn't need anyone else.

The only thing that restrains you is fear, Anton Gorodetsky. For yourself, or for people—that's not important. But we are restrained by horror. And that is why we observe the Treaty.

Love is a great power, and such a strange power...

Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses.

Because love is also a power. A great power, and it should not be disdained.

But I’m quite sure of one thing: If it’s possible to do something, sooner or later someone’s going to do it.

If they do anything to me, just skin them alive, sweetheart," I said. "I'll do more than that-- I'll make them eat their own skins.

If you have love in you, it’s a strength. But if you are in love, it’s a weakness.

She had never liked people who spoke too familiarly upon first meeting. There ought to be a little bit more formality.

Maybe it was cold and miserable in the forest, but man can bring his own warmth and comfort anywhere he goes.

People don't usually think about the meaning of the words they say. It seems to them that words convey truth. That when someone hears the word "red" he will think of a ripe raspberry and not a pool of blood. That the word "love" will evoke Shakespeare's sonnets and not the erotic films of Playboy. And they find themselves baffled when the word they've spoken doesn't evoke the right response.