You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.