Quotes from James W. Hall

How his family was killed. Fakhri and his thugs raiding villages, burning, raping. Sunnis, Shi'a, Alawites, Christians, everybody killing everybody else. People say the Mafia's bad. Mafia's nothing next to those fucking religions.

You don't have any morals, do you, Senator? You're worse than me, do any fucking thing to get what you want." Against his chest she said, "Some people are chosen, Ray. I'm one of those. I make morals, I don't follow them." "I like that. You make morals. That's good." She said, "Morals are for the masses, the little people, to keep them from too much independent thinking.

Ze glimlachte naar hem. "Op momenten zoals deze krijg je maar één kans.

All you need is love. It sounded true but wasn't. You needed a hell of a lot more than that. You needed tolerance and self-control, and you needed empathy and strength and discipline and flexibility. You needed serenity and good luck.

He'd felt the same way some nights on patrol, hearing the jungle shift and creak around him in the dark. His head saying, go ahead, take your best shot, I'm not scared of you slanty-eyed buttwipes. And at the same time his heart was trying to parachute out his asshole.

isn't the greatest loss in life,'" Lawton said to Anne. "'The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

If he could not find the exact words for something, it did not fully exist. And if he could say it well enough, almost anything was possible. X-88

On land there was no choice. You conformed to the rigid structures others had left behind. But out there on the bay, it was different. Everything was fluid. Go here, go there. No signs, no narrow lanes, no walls, no paths worn into the water. Out there you were restricted only by the draft of your boat, your energy and will. Your imagination.

You start thinking about Yeats, him saying that life was a long preparation for something that never happens. You just got to wait it out.