“Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.”

“I always like the bad ones. I know he's a bad one of some sort.”

“I guess you are all right. That was bad luck all right. Plenty bad luck.”

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”

“This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”

“Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”