You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?" "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people. - Ross Macdonald

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.