A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

It's pretty cool to see yourself on a video game.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches--enduring loneliness.

Worshiping God even amid despair is a way to defy the Adversary and declare our valuing of the good-the best-in life: the Lord!

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

There is no love that is not an echo.

That means that the universe is two-dimensional. Matter, energy, time, you, me and the floor are holograms.