We don't all make it out the other side, not all of us. But somewhere, there's the click of a pen, a proud signature, a father's hand on a young man's shoulder, and we reload. That's the sound of our collective gun cocking, the click of a pen. That's us racking another round in the chamber. Fire that boy out, hope you hit something. If he gets three before he goes home in his own bag, then the numbers look good. That father gets his medal. No one else to wear it.

Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

Where's the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time.

Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them. I don't know how we got started with subverting that purpose.

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.

Imagination just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. - Juliette, Pg. 139

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.

He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots.

This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do. Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.

Here was the love and violence in the hearts of men, all for their women

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.

I guess what I'm sayin' is, if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful.” “Why be careful?” Marnes asked.Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead.“'Cause she'll damn well do it. Even if you don't really expect her to.

The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

She could tell he was exhausted, maybe half as much as she was, but he was still willing to do anything for her. It made her sad, someone being this loyal to her.

It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

Don't get like these assholes and fall in love with the fighting. Then you're just setting off bombs because you like the noise they make.

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.