It was true: hope could be unkind. You opened yourself up to the worst of wounds because you wanted to believe that something good could finally happen. But if you didn't? You missed this. This intense and prefect moment in which, while the world was almost literally going to hells all around you, hope and reality blended in a single, perfect note.

I don't make the laws, I just enforce them." "Then remind me to introduce a new set of laws, since the ones we have clearly assume a level of common sense that's lacking.

In youth,' he said, speaking as if from a great distance, 'we believe, and the death of belief forces us to disavow all belief. But that disavowal, time softens, and if we do not believe, we hope. Belief is easier to kill, somehow, and its death easier to bear.

There is not a man born among us who dreams—at first—of service, although in the end, many are bent that way.

If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we're still reacting to things that don't exist anymore.

Lies were something you told other people to make things easier, somehow - hopefully, for them, but often more selfishly for yourself.

The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.