The single greatest advantage anyone can take into any battle is hope.

I never thought there might be one like you out there. Unaware, untrained. Unbelievable. You have no idea what you are, do you?” “Crazy?

There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I'd rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.

The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadnt expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because hed thought surely the first must have been a mistake.

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.

There are moments in my life when I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to do. I pay attention to them. They’re my cosmic landmarks, letting me know I’m on the right path. Now that I’m older and can look back and see where I missed a turn here and there, and know the price I paid for those oversights, I try to look sharper at the present.

If he were any other man, I might have suspected him of substance abuse, of being coked up or something. But Barrons was too much a purist for that; his drugs were money, power, and control