“Words were sometimes like ammo. They could strike you with fear worse than an arrow. And worse was sometimes knowing ahead a time what the words were.”

“Sometimes the silence of your friends is worse than your enemy's words.”

“It felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were luckyand sometimes you weren’t, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes itwasn’t, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things canalways be better, and things can always be worse.”

“I guess it could be worse. My name could be Tlaquepaque, or Irkutsk, or Pyongyang. Or, you know, Pittsburgh. Sometimes I flip through the atlas just to remind myself of all the names that would be worse than mine.”

“The trouble is, sometimes words are like arrows. Once you shoot them, there's no going back.”

“Some things are best left...unknown, you know? People search for answers and they don’t always like what they get. Sometimes the truth is worse than the lie.”