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‘To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike’
it was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.
‘One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.’ The fingers of her good hand plucked and scrabbled uselessly at his fist. ‘Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.
‘If I had bread for everyone, why the fuck would I be stood here?’
You were a hero round these parts. That’s what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.
‘Men become accustomed to poison by degrees’
‘The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness’
When God means to punish a man, the Kantic scriptures say, he sends him stupid friends, and clever enemies.
‘The memories of our glories fade,’ he whispered, ‘and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened. A pretty girl’s smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. For ever.’ He curled his lip. ‘This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are.’
you should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.’
You can weep over your misfortunes, or you can pick yourself up and make the best of things, shit though they may be.
‘When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.’
To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock.
It put nothing right, he knew that. But perhaps a coin could tip the scales of life by that vital degree, and one among them would be spared. It would be a good thing, to spare even one.
‘If there is one thing I have learned in all my many last stands, it is that death is never certain, only . . . extremely likely.’
Again, the women in men’s clothes. Did they have to torture him so?
‘Revenge. If you could even get it, what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood, for what? Who is ever left better off for it?’ His sad eyes watched her slowly stand. ‘Not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on, regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the ones who take vengeance, what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder? Sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?’
‘If men can change like that.’ And Monza snapped her fingers in his face. ‘That’s the only way they do change, ain’t it?’ His one eye stayed on her. ‘If things change enough around ’em? Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.’
Man’s got to be what he is, I reckon. Otherwise what is he? Just pretending, no? And who wants to spend all the time they’re given pretending to be what they ain’t?’
Revenge. I swear, is there a more pointless, destructive, unsatisfying motive in all the world?’
Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea, but weak ones never do.
You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces.
To let my personal feelings reduce the weight of my purse would be an act of criminal unprofessionalism.’
Vengeance brings no man a brighter tomorrow, and when placed on the scales of life, does not outweigh a single . . . scale.
There was never a bad time for flattery from a fine-looking woman, after all.
a man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he finds entirely beyond sufferance.
“War is but the pricking point of politics. Blades can kill men, but only words can move them, and good neighbours are the surest shelter in a storm.”
“Things aren’t what they used to be” is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.’
Strange, that however tough one’s skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.
‘Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing.’
‘I know what I am,’ he whispered. He was no monster. He’d just had enough.
