Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a...

We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.

you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.

A man should not be made to answer for his family.

I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was...

He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.