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I tried to shake off the annoyance. It didn’t work. How do parents always manage to get under your skin?
“He made professor? Hmm.” My mother shrugged. “Very smart idiot is still an idiot.
“Principles,” my mother said, loading the word with contempt. “Things for rich men in rich countries.
“I think,” I said after a pause, “that if you and Dad had focused a bit less on why your ways of doing things were right, and focused a bit more on compromising with each other, then my life would have turned out a hell of a lot better.”
“You think I haven’t had that same thought, many times? There is much time for regret, at my age.”
“I carried a lot of resentment for a long time, but . . . no. My life’s my own, and so are my choices. Anyway, I’ve seen what happens when people hold on to grudges. It doesn’t end well.”
“If you can’t get another ally, next best thing is to give your enemy another enemy.”
“You said there was another reason.” Luna was looking at me steadily. “You said whenever you kill someone, it gets a little bit easier to do it the next time. You said if you’re making the decision to do that, when you’re doing it deliberately, to be really sure you know what you’re doing. Because you’re going to have to live with it forever.”
But there’s really only so long you can keep on feeling miserable about stuff. Eventually you just have to accept that this is the new normal and that’s how things are.
There hadn’t been a moment where I’d had a clear choice between good and evil. I’d just had to choose between bad options, over and over again, and things had kept getting worse.
“Foot soldiers are allowed to complain and feel sorry for themselves. Commanders are not.”
Power doesn’t need a purpose: power is its own purpose. It is the only goal that has value in itself, because it is the means by which all other goals are achieved.”
‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, isn’t it? What does that say about you?” I looked straight at Richard. “You’re worse than a warlord. You’re a bad teacher.”
“I suppose the biggest thing . . . you have to get used to the idea that you’re not a good person. Maybe not an awful one either, but . . . You have to accept that what you’ve done, what you’re going to do, there’s a lot of bad in there. You just hope there’ll be enough good to balance it out.”
