“The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.”

“There is also a reasonable tolerance: reason tolerates the reasonable. It is, however, almost tautological to call this 'tolerance' any longer, as it becomes a matter of course.”

“She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.”

“It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.”

“My grandmother used to say life was so much easier when you were simple-minded.
It’s taken me almost my whole life to understand what she meant.”

“He bit his lip and realized how right the Protector had been to stop him from offering her a commission months ago. Not because she couldn't do the job, but because she was afraid she couldn't. Because she would have refused it, and that refusal would have ended her career forever. Inability, real or imagined, could never truly be overcome once an officer accepted deep inside that he could no longer hack it. That damage was almost always permanent, for it was self-inflicted and no one else could heal it for him.”

“There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”

“She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

“She had been born for this man, and she had spent so many years trying to accept the fact that he had been born for someone else…”

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”