But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

If you want to know what your true beliefs are- take a look at your actions.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

I always believe your instinct is the most correct instinct.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

Hope is not strategy. Hope fits with vision, but we must have a strategy and a process to make our vision become a reality.

I want all my friends, family and fans to know that I am in good spirits and I will be fine.

Who does Bill Clinton think got off the boat and stepped on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers?

The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that...we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.

I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.

God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat.