“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
“The most peaceble people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed.”
“In a civilized country you can never tell.”
“Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?”
“You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.”
“He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.”
“Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.”
“Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing [...] appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something”
“more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none.”
“Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.”
“I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time. Where secrets are concerned, compared to me, the grave is a chatterbox”
“Did we risk our lives to defend a just society, where guilt must be proven and not assumed? Or are we no better than the oppressive kings from whom our fathers fled?”
“short, dark hair and strong shoulders. He had a handsome, intelligent”
“What makes life interesting are the challenges we face.”
“Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:
'When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quiet lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”
“They did not hear Grimble, as he lay dying, chant in the true voice of the Boreal Owl, in tones like chimes in the night, an ancient owl prayer, “I have redeemed myself by giving belief to the wings of the young. Blessed are those who believe, for indeed they shall fly."”
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