“Justice has nothing to do with it. Stark, bloody, screaming, agonizing vendeance is what I'm talking about.”

“I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.”

“I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.”

“books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.”

“Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.”

“I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.”

“The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.”