When did you get so clever?””When I realized I wasn’t as clever as I thought.
There’s a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.It is really that simple.And that hard.
He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another’s fear to animate it.
The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.
After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.
There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.
When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.
Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.
We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).
As for dying, he didn’t believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.
Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
Was that his name? I never had a chance to ask. He was too intent upon tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.
After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.
The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.
Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can’t but back with them what you most desire.
We lie to protect our children, and in lying we expose them to the greatest of harms
No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself.
You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.
Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.
Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.
My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man’s.
People who believe in buried gods,’ said Louis.‘Do you believe in buried gods, Detective Walsh?’‘I’m Episcopalian. I believe in everything.
And, in the darkness, David closed his eyes as all that was lost was found again.
The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.
Most of the bad situations I’ve encountered began with the best of intentions.
”Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.””really?” said Sarge. “what flavor?
These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.
The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.
Story!” The dwarf snorted. “You’ll be talking about “happily ever after” next. Do we look happy? There’s no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.
Perhaps it’s true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.
The law doesn’t require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that’s acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.–Elwin Stark
We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere.””Where, Purgatory?” said Dozy. “We’re in Hell.
There was a lot to be said for a man’s capacity to be comfortable while alone.
A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer
Why did you shoot him?””You weren’t around,” I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. “If you’d been here I’d have shot you instead.
They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren’t entirely sure that this was a good thing.
If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.
She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.
He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.
A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor.
The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.
I feel that I’ll be buried in Ireland and don’t think I’ll ever live in the U.S. I’m not comfortable with many aspects of U.S. society – especially the justice system.