Because I'm not blind to how Harry works, you know," she said. "A bully with a charisma and top marks is still a bully." She sighed, annoyed. "He'll probably end up Prime Minister one day. God help us all.

As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

Midnight passes and I'm twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

You love him," he says. Not an asking, just a fact. "I do," I say. Also a fact.

The only place you belong is the place you can never go back. And so yer always alone, forever and always.