“When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.”

“Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.”

“You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.”

“This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.”

“You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.”

“All I can think about is that boy’s skull, bashed in, the way his head was caved in and how it wasn’t like a heid at all, just like a broken silly puppet face, about how when you destroy something, when you brutalise it, it always looks warped and disfigured and slightly unreal and unhuman and that’s what makes it easier for you to go on brutalising it, go on fucking it and hurting it and mashing until you’ve destroyed it completely, proving that destruction is natural in the human spirit, that nature has devices to enable us to destroy, to make it easier for us; a way of making righteous people who want to act do things without the fear of consequence, a way of making us less than human, as we break the laws . . .”

“It was Begbie who ensured he could never return. He had done what he wanted to do. He could now never go back to Leith, to Edinburgh, even to Scotland, ever again. There, he could not be anything other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be. He'd stand or fall alone. This thought both terrified and excited him as he contemplated life in Amsterdam.”