“A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.”

“I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.”

“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”

“Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?”

“The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power th...”

“At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally l...”

“July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for...”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?”

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

“Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat ...”

“The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”