“He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He'd always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he'd die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, the knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod's great army. The day he charged at the Cunmur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he'd stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged out moment might be the last.Like Whirrun said - you can't live more than that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.”

“For years, he said, his life had felt to him like a kind of experiment. The question being, How long could he hold out before the whole thing came crashing down on his head? He'd pictured himself looking back on the present day or week from his jail cell, or while contemplating the grass outside the asylum where surely he was headed. But rather than defeating him, these thoughts had actually fueled Wolf with determination. Fuck it, he'd think, if he had to go down, he sure as hell wasn't going without a fight.”

“Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.”

“Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn't afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions. Next he went through his pockets, thinking he'd be helping to identify him.The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; he'd left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he'd paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life - death - was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt. ("Dusk To Dawn")”

“In all his years as a cop he had never felt this helpless, as though he had one hand tied behind his back. He had always been able to sort everything out. People came to him the same way they went to Father Andrew.Now he was watching this family, his family, die a little every day and there was nothing he could do to save them.The worst thoughts of all came in the middle of the night. He would wake from a sound sleep with his heart racing and just knew that wherever Lockie was he was suffering. He was suffering and he was probably just waiting for Pete to come and save him the way the teacher told all the kids every year.”

“Electricity poured though him like liquid agony, setting every nerve on fire. His body arched, his muscles going into spams, a cry tearing itself from between clenched teeth. Then Quintana stepped back, leaving Zach shaking, breathless, wanting to puke. Strangely, he found the pain easier to bear now than he had two weeks before. Perhaps it was just that he'd been through this before. Or perhaps it was the fact that his pain was buying time for the woman he loved. Why hadn't he told her? Why hadn't he told Natalie he loved her when he'd had the chance? It would've taken only a few seconds. What the hell had he been afraid of?And all at once it hit him- regret as deep and wide as the ocean.Natalie.If he died today, she would never know what she meant to him. If he died, he would never even get a shot at building a life with her, of knowing what it was like to come home every night and find someone waiting for him. Hell, he wouldn't even know whether he'd gotten her pregnant. Then don't die, McBride.Zach looked into the eyes of the man who was going to kill him.I love you, Natalie. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. Forgive me.”