“No stories or explanations,' Finnikin had once told him. 'When it comes to women, straight into an apology and you will find the rest of your life bearable.”

“Once you're truly happy with yourself alone, that's when you are safe to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with.”

“That is an apology, not an explanation; and apologies only account for that which they do not alter.”

“When you come that close to not being here, or being told they are going to take your foot off, it changes everything in your life.”

“Embrace your life, find what it is that you love, and pursue it with all your soul. For if you do not, when you come to die, you will find that you have not lived.”

“You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?”

“Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.”

“Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?”

“Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.”

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation. Go and study it.”