“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
“All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.”
“The bonds of friendship dwindle with age, Oliver. But a little blackmail lasts forever.”
“You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.”
“Why?' Said Harry. 'For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea - could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn't matter, because the big idea is always the same - wouldn't it be good if only EVERYONE was the same as ME -if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.
'But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that's where the trouble starts. That's when they show up at your door to make the ones who don't fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon's Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it - you and them - the THEM become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it's always open season on THEM.”
“ On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera.”
“You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards.”
“Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.”
“My muse is an ungrateful harlot who’s abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.”
“Stop hittin’ me!" he cried. "This is hardly fair, now is it? Two of you against me?"
“You’re the one who came at us with a gun,” Ghastly said, standing over him.
“But that was for a giggle,” Jack tried. “I wasn’t aimin’ at you, I swear.”
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