She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept th… - Emily St. John Mandel

They call themselves the light."
"What about it?"
"If you are the light," she said, "then your enemies are darkness, right?"
"I suppose."
"If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify. There's nothing you can't survive, because there's nothing that you will not do.

“My secret is, I hate people,” the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her.
“All people?”
“All except maybe like three,” she said.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.