“It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.”
“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?”
“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy. you'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me inside, you outside. We'll crush him between our smiles.”
“These were true things, Laura knew, but they were only part of the truth which was something less orderly than Kate made it sound. Some parts of the full, disorderly truth were lodged in Kate and Laura like splinters of corroding steel. Their feelings had grown around the sharp, wounding edges which didn't hurt anymore but were still there, fossils of pain laid down in the mixed-up strata of memory.”
“Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”
“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”
“There’re a couple of books that discuss this,” Heath said to his friend. “On Killing [by Dave Grossman] is a good one. He writes about cops, and he discusses troops from the Civil War all the way up to now.”
“I once watched him remove a living man’s face. He took one tiny patch of flesh at a time until the faceless, blubbering man was staring through lidless eyes at a bloody mosaic of his own skin pasted on a mirror that had been set so he could watch every cut of the operation.”
“Fuck! You’re like a drug to me.” She whispered into the dark, “Consume me.” He rushed upon her then. Sir found her wrists in the dark and pulled them above her head. He held onto them with one hand while the other fumbled with his zipper, then guided his shaft into her. She cried out at the force of his entry. He covered her mouth to keep her quiet as he began thrusting hard,”
“Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.”
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