“...a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potato-like contours...”

“there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation." [p.28]”

“Yessir. A crutch, like one-legged men always have.”

“It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.”

“… Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself, Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.”

“Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child. I liked to roll words over my tongue like a lump of molten honeycomb, savouring the sweetness, the crackle, the crunch.”

“I had always been a great talker and teller of tales. 'You should put a lock on that tongue of yours. It's long enough and sharp enough to slit your own throat,' our guardian warned me, the night before I left home to go to the royal court at Versailles ... I just laughed. 'Don't you know a woman's tongue is her sword? You wouldn't want me to let my only weapon rust, would you?”