~ Want to know one ugly thought? ~ Are there not enough in the world already? ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming… - Iain Banks

It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them.

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.