“You think it's all written, but it's not. There's always another way to twist those three chords around.”

“In order to be near us, to hang out with us, it was good to have drugs.”

“Yeah, all those things, responsibility, pressure. It's a bit stressful. I try and come to terms with it by not thinking about it.”

“Every man makes mistakes, Shade, it's a cross every person has to bare. People make mistakes. It is the way we feel about those mistakes, the way we come back from them, that defines who we really are.”

“It's what surprised him most -- not the overpowering love all the books required that he feel for his child -- just that he simply liked being around him. And even with the diagnoisis, or even since, there's something a little joyous, alongside all the disaster, about living with Hendrick. Some feeling he gets about being in better or closer contact with the things we need, the things we want. I want to run the controls on the dump truck. I want to touch the faucet. I want to open the drawer three hundred times in a row. Because who doesn't want that from time to time? To fall deeper in? Who doesn't do it? Some mornings Jack taps his own spoon a few extra times on the rim of the cereal bowl just for the sheer pleasure of it, and then he'll wonder what the space really is, after all, between tic and illness.”

“This is stupid.""Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.”

“I'm a romantic and I kinda believed in this fairy tale. And in some ways I think that's always been to my advantage, because like if you can believe in something great, I feel like you can achieve something great.”