Sergei Lukyanenko

Others are not born bad or good... and neither are people, by the way.

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.

You're on your own little quest, an there's a bit of Frodo Baggins in you, and a bit of Verne's Paganel, and just a tiny drop of Robinson Cursoe, and a smidgeon of Radishchev.

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

Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you--these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones.

And that, Pavel, is why you shouldn't use magic for every tiny little thing. Where you can put your trust in science, that's what you should do.

Forgiving was the hardest thing. Sometimes forgiving was the hardest thing in the whole world.

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

Do you know what it's like to be condemned to love?

Why was is that the Light acted through lies, and the Darkness acted though the truth? Why was is that our truth proved powerless, but lies were effective? And why was the Darkness able to manage perfectly well with truth in order to do Evil?

A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl__he bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic.

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.

What was my truth worth, if I was prepared to defend the entire world, but not those who were close to me? If I subdued hate, but wouldn't give love a chance?

In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive.

You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery.""All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more__ou're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two.""You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself.""So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?"Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?"Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man.

What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring the grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous phenomena! Kids sense that, you know__t's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Han and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast__o the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!

People don't usually think about the meaning of the words they say. It seems to them that words convey truth. That when someone hears the word "red" he will think of a ripe raspberry and not a pool of blood. That the word "love" will evoke Shakespeare's sonnets and not the erotic films of Playboy. And they find themselves baffled when the word they've spoken doesn't evoke the right response.

The laws of nature are not intelligent,_ I replied. __he force of gravity is not intelligent. Electricity is not intelligent. A savage looking at a television might assume that it__ a sapient being, but we____ sapient being? Looking at a television these days, the only possible assumption is that it__ a loud-mouthed, hysterical madman suffering from progressive mental debility,_ Anna Tikhonovna said derisively.