Sergei Lukyanenko - Night Watch (1998)

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Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses.

Sergei Lukyanenko
This was how you wound up in the Inquisition. When you stopped being able to see any difference between Light Ones and Dark Ones. When for you, people weren't even a flock of sheep, but just a handful of spiders in a glass jar. When you stopped believing in the future, and all you wanted to do was preserve the status quo. For yourself. For those few individuals who were still dear to you.

Sergei Lukyanenko
When leaders betray their people and the people don't overthrow them, it's not just the leaders who should be blamed.

Sergei Lukyanenko
When there are strange things going on all around, every coincidence should be considered very carefully.

Sergei Lukyanenko
We're not given the chance to choose absolute truth. Truth's always two-faced. The only thing we have is the right to reject the lie we find most repugnant.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Being on the side of the Light is much tougher than being on the side of the Dark...

Sergei Lukyanenko
Generally speaking, we can and should say everything. We just have to choose the right time, otherwise the truth can be worse than a lie.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Fairy tales lie just as much as statistics do, but sometimes you can find a grain of truth in them.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Drinking beer in a children's playground is an old Soviet tradition.

Sergei Lukyanenko
You're a big boy, you ought to understand that punctual transport, public order and safe streets, polite people and good medical services are all the achievements of dictatorship.

Sergei Lukyanenko
When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny.

Sergei Lukyanenko
That's how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Of course we got drunk!" Semyon said. "It's okay to get drunk, Anton. If you need to real bad. Only you have to get drunk on vodka. Cognac and wine—that's all for the heart." "So what's vodka for?" "For the soul. If it's hurting real bad

Sergei Lukyanenko
If age teaches you anything, then one of its lessons is certainly not to hurry if you're already late....

Sergei Lukyanenko
There is no abstract Evil; you have to understand that! Its roots are here, all around us, in this herd that goes on chewing and having a good time only an hour after a murder! That's what you have to fight for. For people. Evil is a hydra with many heads, and the more of them you cut off, the more it grows! Hydras have to be starved to death, do you understand that? Kill a hundred Dark Ones, and a thousand more will take their place.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love its strength and its joy.

Sergei Lukyanenko
That's the way it goes sometimes: in order to help your friends, first you have to help your enemy. Better get used to it.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Many years ago someone told me something that I flatly refused to accept. And I still don't accept it now, despite all the times I've seen it proved right. "The common good and the individual good rarely coincide..." Sure, I know, it's true. But some truths are probably worse than lies.

Sergei Lukyanenko
Nobody can be forced to commit an act of villany. You can't push anybody into the mud; people always step into it themselves. No matter what the circumstances of life are, there are no justifications and there never will be any. But people look for justifications and they find them. All people have been taught to do that, and they've all proved diligent pupils.

Sergei Lukyanenko
An introverted, bookish child, with a mass of complexes and her head full of crazy ideals and a childish faith in the beautiful prince who was searching for and would surely find her.

Sergei Lukyanenko
I believe it, she's a very good person, kind. There's weariness there, but no bitterness or spite. When you're with a girl like that you feel like a different person. You try to be better, and that's a strain. Men prefer to be friends with her kind, flirt a bit, share confidences. They don't often fall in love with girls like that, but everybody loves them.

Sergei Lukyanenko
An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense.

Sergei Lukyanenko
One day you will hear the sound of time rustling as it slips through your fingers like sand. Remember me then. I wish you luck.

Sergei Lukyanenko
The hardest thing of all is when pain is hidden behind a mask of calm.

Sergei Lukyanenko