“The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more tha...”

“My brave husband came back from fighting the Turks and brought me a robe of silk and a necklace of human teeth. He sat up at night by his hearth telling tales of battle. Apparently the Turks are te...”

“I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.”

“I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope an...”

“They were just the ordinary sounds of of people beginning their day, silly raucous, discordant, but they were the most beautiful sounds on earth, the sounds of living people.”

“Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?'He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for mon...”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, warm, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturne...”

“For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”