Andrew Klavan

“No one starts out with the answers. You figure them out as you go and you learn from the people who figured them out before you.”

“There are things you can describe in life and things you just can’t. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fear that you can tell about… well, then there’s hope and joy and love – and those are beyond the power of words to describe.”

“Do right. Fear Nothing.”

“Our moral decisions about ourselves can be spiritual. Our moral decisions about other people can only be practical.”

“Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him.”

“If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing.”

“It can be crazy hard. To keep your faith, to keep going. It can be harder than I ever would have imagined. Sometimes things happen to you, really bad things that aren't fair, things that make you feel so terrible you're not even sure who you are anymore or whether you're right or wrong, good or bad. Sometimes you feel like there's no one to turn to, and you're all alone and so scared you can hardly move and so tired you just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep forever. I guess that's kind of the way Alex felt that last night I saw him. And that's the way I felt now. But I guess I had one advantage over Alex. I guess in some way I'd been training for this time my whole life. I'd been training every day, even in simple things, little things. I trained to keep my mind sharp when I went to school. I trained in karate to keep my body and spirit strong. Even when I just went to church, or when I prayed by myself, it was a kind of training: I was training to remember that I was not alone. I was never alone.”

“Theoretically, let's stipulate, for argument's sake, that there are a lot of powerful people at a university like this who believe things that aren't, strictly speaking, true."Leftists, you mean."Let's just call them people. Powerful people."All right."These powerful people believe things like: One culture is as good as another. Or, there's no such thing as good and evil. Therefore, if America is at odds or at war with someone, it must be America's fault. You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true. But these people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say they're not true. So they attack anyone who says that they're not true. They call him names. Racist, sexist, phobic, offensive, whatever. They demand apologies from him. They make his life a misery, so no one wants to speak up."So it's like the emperor's new clothes."Right. Except instead of clothes, it's all the emperor's lies. And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth.”

“Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.”

“North," said the face beneath the sheet. "I belong to the National Association of Broadcasting Employees and Technicians. If you wake me up before I've slept twelve hours, I get paid short turnaround.""But Rose--""If you wake me up before seven hours, I get to push a screwdriver into your lungs."— from "The Scarred Man”

“You know what it's like," said Storm, "when you want to--just--pour a woman into a glass and--just-drink her--just drink her down, one gulp, body and soul?”