XeniaAnn

“Gradually, however, she revealed a frustration with the willful ignorance that is an abiding human trait, an indignation at the cruelty that people visit upon one another. She might see the world as hopeless, but she believed it did not have to remain that way.”
― Dean Koontz, The Good Guy

“In all his writing he had tried to reconcile the words “reason,” “logic” and “science” with the words “God,” “faith” and “Qur’an,” and he had not succeeded, even though he used with great subtlety the argument from kindness, demonstrating by Qur’anic quotation that God must exist because of the garden of earthly delights he had provided for mankind, and do we not send down from the clouds pressing forth rain, water pouring down in abundance, that you may thereby produce corn, and herbs, and gardens planted thick with trees? He was a keen amateur gardener and the argument from kindness seemed to him to prove both God’s existence and his essentially kindly, liberal nature, but the proponents of a harsher God had beaten him. Now”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“By the European Julian calendar it was already November 4, exactly one year and seven months from the date—dare she think of it—when she’d determined to withdraw the Montglane Service from its hiding place of a thousand years. But here in Russia, by the Gregorian calendar, it was only October 23.”
― Katherine Neville, The Eight

“You've met our guards." He gestured at the silent cylindrical guide. "The secret warriors: the binja.”
― China Miéville, Un Lun Dun