A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him.
The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn’t think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn’t the same as murder, it was a fair fight.
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he’s done, and that’s as good as any man ever gets.
Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don’t put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.
War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.
Human: That’s stupid. Isn’t there grass on both sides?
We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness – the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.
All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That’s why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.
The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they’re so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest.
Make friends. Be a leader. Kiss butts if you have to, but if the other guys despise you-you know what I mean?
Don’t lie to me! Don’t seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I’ll never be able to take joy in it again.
I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.
The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish and nothing more.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I’m not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.
With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.