It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw, " that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

l(aleaffalls)oneliness

When someone who's starved of love is shown something that looks like sincere affection, is it any wonder that she jumps at it and clings to it?

Reggie, you wrapped your sports car around a telephone pole after drinking a bar." "Yeah... But I was wearing my seatbelt.

The United Nations has been in the Great Lakes Region and Sahel for 50 years, mostly investing in peacekeeping. NOW is the time to invest in young people!

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years.

The truly valiant dare everything but doing anybody an injury.

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

You have to know what you want and keep going for it.