When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Hi, I'm a hero, but I can't tell you why. It's classified.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.

Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.