My whole body is a lethal weapon, you know. I know more ways to kill you than you know how to die.

I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

Closure isn't closure until someone's ready to close the door.

But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.