I finished reading the book quite some weeks back now, and here are the remaining quotes:
- The burden of happiness can only be relived by the balm of suffering.
- Real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.
- People always hurt us with their trust.
- A man must love his bear.
- She always told the truth, even when she was lying.
- Wealth and power were measured by the privacy that only money could buy and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce.
- I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.
- Yes, what is it, Tariq? I’d asked him irritably. Oh, I’m sorry, he’d replied. Do you want to be lonely?
- A kings is a bad enemy, a worse friend and a fatal family relation.
- Some of the worst wrongs were caused by people trying to change things.
- Like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die as much as I wanted to live.
- The devil is in the details.
- She was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity.
- Silence is the tortured man’s revenge.
- You’re fucked. Your life is over.
- Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.
- Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.
- Every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
- The only victory that really counts in prison is survival.
- Cruelty is a kind of cowardice.
- Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.
- Evil is the root of all money.
- A secret isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.
- If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.
- You don’t inform on people, not for any reason.
- It is possible to do the wrong things for the right reasons.
- We can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.
- Happiness is a myth; it was invented to make us buy things.
- They were unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt in appearance. They were also intelligent, honest, and unconditionally loyal to one another.
- If I’d been a different man, a better man, I would’ve cried. And who knows, it might’ve made the difference.
- The moment was lost.
- Such is life.
- A man has to respect himself before he can respect anyone else.
- Can one act of genius allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?
- She had to become a widow for life, before she was even married.
- There is nothing so depressing as good advice.
- We never feel or express any one emotion without feeling something of its opposite.
- I think I love him, in a kind of insane way, but I don’t trust him. Is that a horrible thing to say about the guy you stay with?
- Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.
- Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress.
- We were red-lining our lives.
- Fighing to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.
- The fully mature man or woman has about two seconds left to live.
- You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
- If we envy someone for the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom.
- Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.
- Fate gives us all three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives.
- We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died.
- Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.
- The nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want. (it = herion)
- But I hadn’t asked the right question. I hadn’t asked about her. I’d asked about him.
- A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
- The end mirrors the beginning.
- One of the agonising truths for a battle media is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live.
- The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open.
- Negative space.
- It’s bad, loving someone you can’t forgive. It’s not as bad as loving someone you can’t have.
- Fate always gives you two choices: the one you should take, and the one you do.
- The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads.
- The wheel had turned through one full revolution.
- There is no man, and no place, without war.
- Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.
- No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
Of course the standard disclaimer applies: Quotes are fair use and the original right of the author is asserted.