“Children—their untroubled, idyllic vision of the future is almost always shattered. Sooner or later they learn what all youth must—that life is the cruel fate that awaits them while they make plans for a tomorrow that will never be.”

“Why must there always be a price to pay for every indulgence, and why must it so often be withdrawn from the bankrupt accounts of the innocent?”

“Strange, is it not, how even those of us who scoff at divine intervention will fall to our knees and clasp our hands the moment we realize our futures are defined by uncertainty and hazard. A thoughtful man would never leave his knees. A wise man would never drop to them. In any case, it wasn’t really a prayer, but one does like to follow convention now and then.”

“It is a terrible thing to witness death by violence, a thousand times worse to hold a man’s life in your own hands and to willingly, consciously take it from him. Acknowledged or not, something noble has been scoured from your insides, never to be replaced. You saved a friend’s life, and there lies ample justification. But never peace, never balance, never the same. At least that is how it seems to me.”

“You’d be surprised what people will accept once you insist two or three times running that they have seen what you tell them they have seen.”

“The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.”

“I think about that centurion from time to time and wonder, had he retired to a farm in Campagna, happy with his harvest of grapes and grandchildren, or had he fallen amongst his comrades on some distant, ruined field, defending the honor and the ever-expanding borders of the Republic? What we foreigners have failed to comprehend over the centuries is that the proud centurion would have found either fate equally satisfying. This is why Rome grows, and the rest of the world shrinks.”