Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving, but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.

— M.R. Carey

Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

— M.R. Carey

Melanie understands jealousy. She’s jealous, a little bit, every time Miss Justinian talks to another boy or girl in class. She wants Miss Justinian’s time to belong to her, and the reminders that it doesn’t sting a little, make her heart do a gentle drop and thud in her chest.

— M.R. Carey

No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.

— M.R. Carey

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?

— M.R. Carey

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.

— M.R. Carey

She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.

— M.R. Carey

She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.

— M.R. Carey

Some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl “I’m here for you”, the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed.

— M.R. Carey

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.

— M.R. Carey