Quotes from book

The Blind Assassin

“I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.”

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”

“It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.”

“Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.”

“Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.”

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

“When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

“he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

“So much better to travel than to arrive.”