Strategy and tactics, discipline and protocol are necessary, but they’re just the beginning. You have to know people, Byron. How they think, what motivates them. Watch. Learn.
Eventually, it’s better to go forward into it and have things settled than to huddle in terror for one second longer.
This loud was a full-body, weapons-grade loud.
And for a time, there was nothing else to be done. I wept. And the city burned.
Can’t you, like, enhance these?” “No,” Gary said flatly. “Because I don’t have imaginary movie powers.
Wizard knows what he is talking about.” “No, I really don’t,” I said. “That’s the problem.” “But you know that you do not know,” Michael said. “Which is wise.
I felt like a bit of a jackass. When that happens, it’s an excellent idea to shut your mouth.
My knuckles ached to meet his nose.
Her P90, a personal defense weapon that was the bastard child of an assault rifle and a box of Belgian chocolates, was resting on the safety railing, its barrel aimed in the same general direction as where I had been standing and negotiating moments before.
The real war happened when you weren’t looking.
I’d been feeling sorry for myself, which is about the most use- less thing you can feel: it doesn’t do a damned thing for you. You don’t feel any better, you don’t get any better, and you’re too busy moping to do anything to actually make your life any better. There’s.
I’m not saying pain is what defines us as human beings. But it is, in many ways, what unites us.
The words never again mean more to some people than others.
I used the knife. I saved a child. I won a war. God forgive me.
People who are scared need to laugh, and the scarier things are, the more they need it.
If a revolver was good enough for Indiana Jones,” I said, “it’s good enough for me.” “He was a fictional character, Harry.” Her mouth curved up in a small smile. “And he had a whip.
Don’t borrow trouble.
But something deep down inside me stirred, like an old warhorse who hears the sound of trumpets.
Planet Earth isn’t a fair place. It’s unfair in a broad variety of different ways, some worse than others, but it isn’t fair. Not for anybody. And that’s pretty much the fairest thing about it.
It’s okay to hurt. It’s not okay to fail the people who rely on me. That was my point of balance.
If at first you don’t succeed,” Bob said cheerfully, “you probably needed a better plan to begin with.