I Am Pilgrim

nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.

If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

You can kill a thinker, but you can't kill the thought.

If you take the final betrayal out of it,' he said, 'he was a fine agent - one of the best.' I stared at him. 'That's one way of putting it,' I replied. 'If you take the bomb out of it, 6 August was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.

The world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

In war, the first casualty is truth.

The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

Like people say—if you want to make God laugh, tell him you’ve got plans.

if the shit is up to your neck—whatever you do, don’t make waves.

Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.

People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.

A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that ‘sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.

We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.

there was this book I'd read by somebody whose name I couldn't remember and he had this expression 'sorrow floats

The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day.

The interior of the arms dealer's private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs.

you gonna curse the darkness or light a candle?

As a Turkish proverb says--it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.

After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.

I knew he was lying – he was so full of shit that if I gave him an enema I could have fitted him in a shoebox.

She knew, even in marriage, if you advanced too far to please the other person it let them edge away and you ended up always laughing and fighting and screwing on their territory. Sometimes you had to stand your ground and make them come to you—just to keep the equilibrium.

A child without parents learns to survive: they work out early to mask what they feel and if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in their head, and hide inside.

so hot that the locals claimed a pervert was a man who preferred women to beer

I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed, it was a different planet: the world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

I was angry about injustice--about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day, not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their compassion. It was their desperate attempts to save other human being--often total strangers--that ended up costing them their own lives.

Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them. Lost in thought, I headed for the

NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS this – or cares probably – but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says ‘Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.