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was what Karla once called the most dangerous and fascinating animal in the world: a brave, hard man, without a plan.
the density of purposes,
Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny’s walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those.
The past reflects eternally between two mirrors—the bright
mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.
The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
‘Well,’ he puffed, ‘a man has to draw the line somewhere. Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.’
I was in love with her, but I wasn’t sure that I could trust her. It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.
You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’
‘We are the not-people,’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.’
‘THE WORLD IS RUN by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards,’
a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation.’
nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.
IN MY FIRST KNIFE FIGHT I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in
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The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.
Each dead man is a temple in ruins,
Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there.
Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.
And you can’t serve God with a gun.
