You might be able to thrash your way out of a spiderweb, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.

Punch me." "Don't be absurd." "Come on, punch me, Barrons." "I'm not punching you." "I said, punch--OW!" He decked me.

Nobody home but She for Whom I Am the World. Can't go on like this, can't keep doing it.- Jericho Barrons

It seemed Barrons had finally gotten his cake and eaten it too.

She's too young. Too innocent. Too human. For what I'm becoming.

The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.

I didn’t say, You are such a stuffy asshole. And he didn’t say, If you ever burn one of my quarter-of-a-million dollar rugs again I’ll take it out of your hide, and I didn’t say, Oh, honey, wouldn’t you like to? And he didn’t say Grow up, Ms. Lane, I don’t take little girls to my bed, and I didn’t say I wouldn’t go there if it was the only safe place from the Lord Master in all of Dublin.