“Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed.
But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened.”

“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”

“All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.”

“Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.
But the truth was he’d been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped.”

“Here had lived someone else who knew that the only thing waiting at home was a sense of loneliness.

Sometimes it is comforting.

Most often, it isn't.”

“And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”

“They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike …there was no reason."”

“That was the worst thing about having a relationship with someone, even a pretend relationship. You opened up, let someone in, and when it was over, they had all the ammunition they needed to completely destroy you.”

“Pompey had fought brilliantly and in the end routed Caesar's whole force… but either he was unable to or else he feared to push on. Caesar [said] to his friends: 'Today the enemy would have won, if they had had a commander who was a winner.”

“The reason for his anguish, the intolerable burden which had broken him at last, was the simplest thing in the world: he loved his wife. He always had, and he always would. Nothing could change that, but that was what had made his agony bite so deep, the reason he couldn't forgive himself for not somehow making things "all right" again… and the reason he'd had to turn to someone else to rebuild himself when the collapse came. It had been cowardly of him, in many ways, but he simply could not have made himself dump his weakness, his collapse on her shoulders while she coped with everything God had already done to her.”