Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.

Do you know why the leaves change colour, Makin?” They did look spectacular. The forest had grown around us as we traveled and the canopy burned with colour, from deepest red to flame orange, an...

It’s an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for...

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else’s blood on his shirt. You could trust...

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard...

Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.

When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin,...

As a child there’s a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong...