What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disa… - Mary Doria Russell

"Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism."

...and yet, in the end, did Klara Hitler's sickly son ever fire a gun? One hollow, hateful little an. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.

"The single craziest thing about being a priest, he’d found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself.