Victor Methos

You feel other people’s pain deeply.” “Well don’t know bout all that but I know what it’s like ta lose a daughter. They gonna be in a haze for a long time ta come. It’ll be all they think bout.” “Does it get easier over time?” “No, it don’t. But you learn to function anyway.

You are dealing with national security. Anything labeled a national security issie is taken out from the system. There is no due process, no lawyers. They may do with us what they wish. Fear is a government's greatest weapon. With it, they can convince a people that they need to abandon their freedom. In exchange, they get safety. Of course, you just trade one monster for another, but by the time the people realize this, it is too late.

Secrets had the power to make people stick together against the rest of the world.

That’s all that matters—how well you can walk through flames.

Every dictator in history has made that same speech, Bob. Hitler thought he was fighting for the greater good, too. Isn’t it odd that the most defenseless always need to be the ones sacrificed for the greater good?

I’m not a Marxist by any means, but he had a point when he said that philosophers just want to interpret the world when the point is to change it.

You wanna know why people are so devastated when things like this happen? Cause they don’t expect it. They expect to be happy. But that ain’t life.

Laura Thompson

Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts.’ The relationship is all about hero-worship on one side, youth-worship on the other.

At her very first attempt Agatha had understood – or intuited – that a clue based upon character has double the value.

One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose.

God in Heaven listen to me, Listen to my whisper’d prayer Make me worthy, though so lowly, All his love and life to share.

Stirling formed a de facto private army that would cross picket lines in the event of a Communist coup.

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been.

Napoleon Hill

The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way.

Do not wait: the time will never be 'just right'. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.

Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.

Leïla Slimani

We will only be happy," she said to herself, "when we no longer need each other. When we can live a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that does not look at others. When we are free.

Solitude was like a drug that she wasn't sure she wanted to do without.

People who are never satisfied destroy everything around them.

I am fully aware that if I had not been the reader that I am, I would not be the person that I am. This was fundamental in the construction of my morals, of what I am as a citizen, as a woman. I know how carnal the relationship we can have with literature, to the point that it is part of you, that it becomes an organ in its own right.

She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted. 

I will be punished for that, she hears herself think. I will be punished for not knowing how to love.

She drinks and the discomfort of living, the shyness of breathing, all this anguish dissolves in the liquid sips.

James A. McLaughlin

The giant trees were like dormant gods, vibrating with something he couldn't name, not quite sentience, each one different from the others, each telling its own centuries-long story.

When you slack off, what you’re really doing is choosing to fail because you didn’t try hard enough. It was a rational choice, his father had said, for people who would rather fail on purpose than risk finding out they’re not good enough, but if you made that choice you should at least be honest with yourself about what you were doing.

So many people hate snakes. I think it's because they threaten people's worldview- they're alien, limbless, impossible, black magic: a stick come to life. But maybe we're all sticks come to life...We want to think we're exceptional, ensouled, angel fairies or God's special children. The magic of being animate matter isn't enough.

Far away the sun lifted water from the oceans and rained it back onto the land. Life squirmed and sprouted, inhaling, exhaling, it spoke and wept, hatched and died.

Mike Lawson

In order to keep his daughter from going to jail for insider trading, Mahoney had been forced to meet with Castiglia and, for whatever reason, the two men actually liked each other. Maybe that was because there wasn’t that much difference between gangsters and politicians; they just belonged to different gangs.

Unfortunately, the proximity of art and history has little influence on those who govern.

I’m sorry to hear that,” DeMarco said, although he wasn’t sorry. As far as he was concerned Tony deserved to die alone.

It’s like Jack Kennedy,” DeMarco said to Emma. “All the rumors about Joe Kennedy being a bootlegger and having ties to the mob and getting rich on insider trading never really hurt Jack. It sounds like the same thing with Stephanie. By the time she jumped onto the political stage, her old man was dead, his money had been laundered clean, she had nothing to do with his past life.

Barbara Neely

Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure ’nough fool.

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

Maybe his stuff was so good it made her think she could fly!

The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we’re in our thirties.

They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not.

Lisa McInerney

She had a face like a slapped arse and an arse like a bag of Doritos.

The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save.

You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar.

So many other boys and girls grew up with holes in their chests gaping as wide as the Christian fissure that had spat them into the world.

Parents sat gloomy and still, like rows of turnips in a grocer's box. Their little criminals sat with them, tapping LOLs on their phones, or milled in the yard outside stinking of Lynx and taut nonchalance. Solicitors strode in and out in a twist of slacks and briefcases.

There were people dying, too. That's the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor.

Their notion of bringing the world together under the Jesus banner hinted now at effort without recompense, and they hated it.

Naomi Alderman

It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'
And the other answers, 'Because they could.'
That is the only answer there ever is.

This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.

You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies.

Kamila Shamsie

For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?

There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.

You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.

They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.

If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.”

Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.

We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.