“I don't care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”
“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”
“Nothing ever works like you predict it. All plans fall apart as soon as the first shot is fired.”
“Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.”
“Now you had one come back, Harley.”
“I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”
“Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad.”
“any structure that has a ranking system tempts you to try to climb it.”
“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. He thought JFK had said it. I thought it was actually Friedrich Nietzsche, and he said destroy, not kill. What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger.”
“I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast "bloody wars and dread diseases" because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military.”
“People who say "no" right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying "no" but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add "sorry" or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It's human nature. They say, "Sorry, no, why, what happened?”
“Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they’re way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull.”
“key. I need to move up into Duke’s job. Then I’ll be top boy on Beck’s side. Then I’ll”
“OK,’ Duffy said. ‘So what have we got?’ We had rugs. The door rattled upward and daylight”
“fifty feet above the rocks. The wind”
“bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle.”
“They are the we of me.”
“I have been beaten here,
locked away,
violated a hundred times
and a hundred times more.
I have been starved
and cheated,
tricked
and disgraced.
How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.”
“This form, this face, this life living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.”
“Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written.”
“Jason looked like her was trying to figure out an equation. "Let me get this straight. Your table ran away ... because you polished him with windex.”
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