Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

Do you know why the leaves change colour?... Before a tree sheds a leaf it pumps it full of all the poison it can't rid itself of otherwise. That red there--that's a man's skin blotching with burst veins after an assassin spikes his last meal with roto-weed. The poison spreading through him before he dies.

When you take a woman away from her man, what you get is a woman who can be taken away from her man.

Men think if they're getting laid, everything is fine. Women think if they feel good, everything is fine. Neither turns out to be a very good indicator.

Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use 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.