the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.

I have lived most of my life in soldiers’ camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.

I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.

When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.

No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.

This night he was a king before he was a man. At this time, this troubled me. Later, I would have cause to wish it were always so.

He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.

David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

Evolution of belief systems and issues of control? If something is worth believing in, it is timeless.

The moment you can visualize being free from the things that hold you back, you have indeed begun to set yourself free

The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

You go ahead. I'd rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds' urine.

We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.

And of course there is so much of World War II that is documented that we never have seen

All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?