Quotes from David Maine

Why do your camels wear jewelry? --- So I can find them when they wander off. The man is so casual that Cain wonders if such things are marked in some ways that he has overlooked.

And if I'd found you lying there in the sun, and left you? What would you call that if not murder? --- It's not the same, Cain mutters. --- Is to me. A man who witnesses a death without trying to prevent it is as responsible for the man who causes it.

This rejection, this cold unthinking hate. How much it pains him, like a slap against a burnt patch of skin, even after all these years. The unkindness of strangers.

And although those years will not be without trial, they will not lack joy as well. Fleeting as a firefly's burst in the night, but real all the same.

It is only a matter of time before his brother's presence fades from his memory, and the immediate reality of bearing all humanity's loathing becomes once more his daily preoccupation.

Confess what you have done... Do not compound your sin by denying it.

God will not be outpaced.

It occurs to him that there are two kinds of people in the world --- those who long to hear God say their name, and those who dread it.

Know this... The earth sickens of your crime.

Happiness isn't something she spends much time thinking about. Survival, discomfort, hunger...these are the concerns that fill her days.

it takes only a modest amount of disruption to create an inordinate amount of mayhem. It's not necessary to wreak all the destruction yourself. Just begin with a fair amount and man's stupidity and selfishness will do the rest.

But there was also something swimming, an idea, a dream of what we were striving for and what it would look like when we got there. Then we got there, and it didn't look the same at all, somehow...Are all human beings malcontents?

Whatever secrets the dead take with them, they should be allowed to keep. That's my new philosophy. Or put another way: the time to properly know someone is when he, or she, is still alive.

This whole story doesn't make sense! Why would God create a perfect place and then allow the Devil in it, just to trick you? Why tell you not to do something when He could have just removed the tree, and so avoided the problem completely? - Cain

People change in some ways as they grow; in other ways they don't.

He is, he thinks, almost ready to leave this place behind forever. Almost eager, in fact. Almost.

No city, regardless of its charm and wonder, could outshine the shadows of THAT notoriety. No boulevards, no matter how flawless, could make straight a lineage THAT crooked. No city need ever be named Cain to ensure THAT name's preservation for posterity.

I have long since stopped caring what others think, he said. --- Of me or of anything else.

There is so much I need, but you can't get it for me.

Henoch has passed from the childhood stage of unfettered adoration for his father and has moved to a difficult point of feeling that every demand on his person is a deeply rooted injustice. Cain grimaces at the remembered familiarity of THAT.

Cain wonders for the first time, whether a child is born with the man already inside him waiting to emerge; or if there is only blankness, a void inside ready to be filled with whatever might be placed there.

Cain wonders what his father had made of him at this age. The idea is startling, that he and his father might have such things in common as pleasures and annoyances of parenthood. Seldom has he let himself consider the world through his father's eyes.

You've nobody to blame but yourself, you know.

He has many reasons to scorn the bulk of humanity, and feels no shame for it.