“Being old enough to know better but still too young to resist mostly sucks.”
“Every time a horse let you up onto its back, it’s giving you its life. Every time.”
“I swear to you on any kind of sacred whateverthefuck you favor: if I live through this I will absolutely start taking your advice."
"That'll look nice on your headstone.”
“Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.”
“169. We whip them. Starve them. Chain them. Break their spirits. Break their minds. Still they love us. Still they offer up their lives without hesitation. Because when a horse loves you, it’s fucking absolute. And all they ask is that you love them back. Most of them never get even that.”
“How can he love being... that? Being what Caine is?"
"Because he's an asshole," she says. "You must have noticed.”
“If I have to make moves in her, we'll all get bloody. You, go wake up Raithe. Tell him Hari's waiting to see him. He'll come with you."
"Hari?" He frowned like he wasn't sure if he was being kidded. "Of what abbey? In what land?"
"Hari of Do as You're Told in the land of And Shut the Fuck Up.”
“A girl likes to be asked, dumbass.”
“I am also, well… I’m in awe. He’s killed people, and saved people. He’s fought monsters, and he’s fought men who became monsters. He’s saved kingdoms and toppled empires. Now he has set himself against the gods to save a universe… and I used to change his diapers. I used to yell at him to make his bed.”
“And so, here at the end of days, you are as you’ve always been. Willing to die. Not willing to quit”
“You assume that I don’t know and I do care. The truth is the other way around.”
“Do you think I’d start a war without knowing how to end it?”
“You’ve done it at least three times that I know of!”
“Ah sure, bring up the truth.”
Caine and T'Passe”
“That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.”
“It may be there’s such a thing as a tool than can’t be used as a weapon, but I’ve never met one.”
“The hope crashes into reality and people get hurt.”
“I have known you since the world was born. Everything you are is what you should be. Everything you should be is what you are. I know all of you, and there is nothing in you I do not love.”
“It’s desperate in life to be beloved of God.”
“Depends on the God.”
“Does it?”
“Christ, I hope so.”
the horse-witch and Caine”
“Names are masks, they get in the way.”
“Be not afraid, child. Be what you are.”
“If you have to justify an action, you probably shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
“Grab some caviar from the kitchen. You wouldn't believe the muck they feed us in Bartleby's for ten thousand a term.”
“Then run to me.” Dante’s eyes were fierce as he held her gaze. “I know all about fear, Tess. It lives in me too. That ‘seizure’ I had in your clinic? It’s not a medical condition, not even close.” “What is it?” “Death,” he said woodenly. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve had these attacks—these visions—of my last moments alive. It’s hellish beyond imagining, but I see it as if it’s happening. I feel it, Tess. It’s my fate.” “I don’t understand. How can you be sure of that?” His smile was wry. “I’m sure. My mother had similar visions of her own death, and my father’s too. They happened precisely as she envisioned them. She couldn’t change what was to happen, or turn it back. So I’ve been trying to outrun my own end. I’ve been running from it forever. I’ve kept myself insulated from things that might make me want to slow down and live. I’ve never permitted myself to truly feel.” “There’s danger in feeling,” Tess murmured. Although she could not begin to imagine what kind of pain Dante carried within him, she felt a kinship growing between them. Both alone, both adrift in their worlds. “I don’t want to feel anything for you, Dante.” “God, Tess. I don’t want to feel anything for you either.”
“The world was a soup and thought was generally a fork: it seldom resulted in a good meal.”
“We know about bad guys, what they do, and often, who they are. The politicians have chosen to send us into battle, and that's our trade. We do what's necessary. And in my view, once those politicians have elected to send us out to do what 99.9 percent of the country would be terrified to undertake, they should get the hell out of the way and stay there.
This entire business of modern war crimes, as identified by the liberal wings of politics and the media, began in Iraq and has been running downhill ever since. Everyone's got to have his little hands in it, blathering on about the public's right to know.
Well, the view of most Navy SEALs, the public does not have that right to know, not if it means placing our lives in unnecessary peril because someone in Washington is driving himself mad worrying about the human rights of some cold-hearted terrorist fanatic who would kill us as soon as look at us, as well as any other American at whom he could point that wonky old AK of his.”
“If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.”
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