“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”

“Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the...”

“I'm frightend. Of us. I want to go home. O God I to go home." "It's was an accident," said Piggy stubbornly,"and that's that." He touched Ralph's bare shoulder and Ralph shuddered at the human cont...”

“He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.”

“The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

“The thing is--fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”

“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the l...”

“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.”

“[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.”

“I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.”

“It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.”

“We are the same, you and I. Whether samurai or night-hawk, the Suruga Dainagon or member of the Toudouza, it makes no difference. My sword is the proof...."These words, wrung from the very depths o...”

“War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up some failure on the part of the adults.”

“War is the echo that never dies. No society strives for war, they are always tricked into it.”

“How can our words ever truly be our own? Since we started growing all we've been taught is to care how we represent our persona and how we should communicate appropriately and how we portrait ourse...”