“What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence”

“This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”

“I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.”

“Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.”

“He was then sixty-two years old, an age by which most men are in the grave or at least occupying a chair in Death's antechamber.”

“To one laden with crime, death came armed with double terror.”