“I said we aren’t here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we’re here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry up and get dead.”

“The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.”

“Because I wasn’t anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are--if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are--we’re already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I’m dead. The hell with me.”

“--I truly and deeply wanted to kill him. And I believe I could have done it, with nothing but my hands. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Peter had an arm around me. "Let it go, Kade," he was whispering very gently, though his arm was nearly crushing me. "Open your fists," he said, "and let go of the coals.”

“It was so good to see him in there, yet so funny to find him so much like me, and so tiny. "Nice kingdom you got here," I added, laughing again. "But it didn't feel quite right without you. Or should I say, without me?"This time he laughed too, and though there were no bubbles or sound I could feel his delight rise up through the water: which made me laugh even harder: which made him do the same.--Page 84, "The Brothers K”

“Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them-- learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it--phshhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”

“I call hellfire a threat,” Natasha said, “ and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.”