The Little Liar

by Mitch Albom

He creates words to blanket his evil. This is an old trick. If you want to get away with lying, first change the language.

in desperate moments people hear what they want to hear, despite what they might see right in front of them.

Having already learned parts of eight different languages, Nico had a system. Learn certain key verbs (do, want, see, make, go, come, eat, sleep), certain key nouns (food, water, room, friend, family, country), memorize all the pronouns, then begin to fill in the rest.

questioning a madman is like interrogating a spider. They both go on spinning their webs until someone squashes them out of existence.

When the Wolf stirred his followers in the 1930s, it worked not because Germans were inclined to hate Jews, but because all humans are inclined to hate others if they believe they are the cause of their unhappiness. The trick is to convince them. It isn’t hard. Just find a group that feels aggrieved and point at another group as the source of their woes.

deep down, she felt intensely connected to him, the way we often feel about those we loved young, even decades later, even after they have changed dramatically.