It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

Few things worth having can be got easily.

No half measures. Some things can’t be cut in half. You can’t half-love someone. You can’t half-betray, or half-lie.

You can't grow if you're constantly defined by this collection of frozen moments that you keep returning to. And if you can't grow, you're not alive.

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.