Trevanion wrapped his arm around his son's neck like shepherd's hook and dragged him along playfully. when he let go, Finnikin thought he would have liked his father to hold on a moment longer.

He knows no other way but ugliness,” Sir Topher said quietly. “He was taught no other lessons but those of force. His teachers have been scum who live by their own rules. No one has ever taught him otherwise.” “Am I to forgive?” she said, her voice shaking with anger. “No,” he said sadly. “Pity him. Or give him new rules. Or put him down like a wild animal before he becomes a monster who destroys everything he encounters.

And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. (...) But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can't do this to her, not after the Hermit thing." "Do what to me? I don't think leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs," I lie. "You being on that platform changed mine.

The people I'm stuck with in my life now aren't sucking the life out of me, they just suck.

Your problems are out there. But they're small. They only grow out of proportion when they climb inside your head.

In the end, the sum of my vices is all me.

It’s Tolstoy, by the way,” I say as I open the door. He turns around. “What?” Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up. “The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.