Quotes from C.S. Harris

Love. I think an angel would fear falling in love with a mortal—someone who could be theirs for only a short time and then would slip away forever.

Far too many people will believe anything of those they hate, no matter how absurd or patently fabricated it may be.

Is he dead? [Hero Devlin] Alexi knelt in the snow beside the still body. Not yet. But he will be soon. Hero sucked in a deep breath tainted with the stench of fresh blood and burning fur. Good. Alexi looked up at her. Your muff is on fire. Drat, said Hero, dropping the flaming fur into the melting snow. I just purchased it.

Bringing this man's murderer to justice was more important to Sebastian than he could begin to explain, even to himself.

Murder is unseemly. Making certain a killer doesn't get away with what he has done is an obligation we the living owe to the dead—no matter how unsavory we consider them to be.

I always say there's nothing wrong with a bit of vice as long as it's not taken to the extreme. Give me someone with a touch of vice over someone with an excess of sanctimonious hypocrisy any day.

Sir Humphrey Carmichael had paid through the nose for the privilege of marrying the daughter of a marquis, so that his son might call himself a gentleman. A gentleman's wealth came from land, or investments, or inheritance; he never actually took a direct hand in the vulgar business of earning money.

If this war has taught us anything, it is that convictions of righteous certitude can be soul-corrupting illusions that offer mo dispensation from hell.

the merry green eyes and a roguish dimple

Powerful men who believe their wealth is threatened generally are dangerous.

Hardly. Guin was passionate about many things, but government wasn't one of them. As far as she was concerned, one crowned puppet is pretty much the same as the next.

Yet he'd always seen religion's externalization and personification of evil as mankind's shirking of responsibility. It reminded him of a child's excuse to avoid both punishment and blame: He made me do it. It's not my fault. Satan tempted me. Not, Satan is a part of me. I am Satan.

War tends to make us all students of diplomacy, does it not? There is a story that Napoléon once told the widow of the Marquis de Condorcet that he detested women who meddled in politics. Do you know her reply?' Sebastian shook his head. 'She said, "You are right, of course, General. But in a country where one cuts off women's heads, it is natural that they should wish to know the reason why.

odor like that of rotting meat permeated

There was something about the act of killing that could bring out everything primitive and not quite human within a man.

To the King over the water. It was an old toast, dating back a hundred years or more, a ruse by which men could seemingly drink to the health of the reigning Hanoverian monarch while in reality maintaining their allegiance to that other king, the dethroned Stuart King James II and his descendants, condemned forever to live in exile.

And because she loved him so much, because she would always love him, she forced herself to say what needed to be said, although the words tore open every old bleeding wound she'd hidden away so deep within her. "And I would do it again," she whispered, "because you are who you are, while I am . . . what I am." His

He made an honest woman of me. It's a curious expression, don't you agree? An 'honest woman' is a very different creature from an 'honest man' and has nothing to do with the truth or lack thereof. Just as a woman's honor is a very different thing from a man's. It's as if when it comes to women, all possible virtues—honesty, honor, even virtue itself—are reduced simply to whom we allow between our legs.

Two hundred years before, in the days of the Tudors, Bloody Queen Mary had used the conveniently open space to burn Protestants to save their souls, and her sister, Elizabeth, had in turn used it to burn an even greater number of Catholics, because that's what royals did with people they hated.

The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that.

What was done to the Highlanders after Culloden would forever be a dark stain on the English soul. Everything from the pipes to the plaids to the Gaelic language itself had been forbidden, obliterating an

Hero started to say something, then swallowed it. Cousin Victoria's presence in Berkeley Square should have made Hero feel better. She tried to tell herself that her instinctive dislike of the woman was irrational and baseless. But

The war had taught us so many things: how to spin wool and weave cloth; how to fashion our own shoes from old saddle leather and sturdy canvas; how to plow fields and mend fences. Now it had taught us to kill, and how to protect ourselves from the consequences of those killings with a grim purposefulness that would have been unimaginable even a year before.

Napoléon Bonaparte was an upstart Corsican soldier of fortune whose ambition-fueled ascension to the throne of France threatened to undermine every foundation of civilization and the social order.