“He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.”

“Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”

“The dead pull the living down.”

“If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.”

“He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and ...”

“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”

“On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgias Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Mosc...”

“There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, A lie told often enough becomes the truth. There is another one, a...”

“Oh, Blimey O'Riley's pantyhose....What is the point of Shakespeare? I know he is a genius and so on, but he does rave on. 'What light doth through yonder window break?' It's the bloody moon, for Go...”

“Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way is your star." So Judas lifted up ...”

“To use a man for what he is naturally best fitted is to keep him, if one can, from apostasy and dissatisfaction. At the same time, life's temptations come most often from that for which one has the...”

“Judas became the spokesman of all those who through the centuries would protest the ornamentation of the Christian cult and would feel that, when the best of gold and jewels were given to the God W...”