Scars are just another kind of memory.

Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot’em both, and then it’s too late.

From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the...

Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever’s in charge of it.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like...

Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.

If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no...

Sometimes, you’re the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it’s the other poor bastard who’s left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.

Life,’ thought Septimus, … ‘you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don’t look so different anymore to some.

Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad...

Christ–the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.

It is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things … I would...

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.

I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.””But it’s not that easy.”He smiled that Frank smile....

That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.

And the stars: the sky gets crowded at night, and it is a bit like watching a clock, seeing the constellations slide across the sky. It’s comforting to know that they’ll show up, however bad...

Then he remembered Ralph’s words–“no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.

Lives gone, traces left.

The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a...

Sometimes that’s the only place telling the truth get you, too.