“in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them”

“This torture inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her feeble attempts, doomed in advance, to remove the liqueur-glass from my grandfather's hands -- all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so accustomed as to smile at them and to take the persecutor's side resolutely and cheerfully enough to persuade oneself that it is not really persecution; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband drinking brandy," in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them.”

“All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.”

“The tenacity and fearlessness I had witnessed in the people—our guides, the young rebels in the boat, the nun—and the inspiring way they conducted their lives in the face of constant danger, helped me to see that the distinction between what we think we cannot do and what we must do is often not a matter of choice. On a personal level, I was brought face-to-face with my own fears, which I discovered were more relenting than I had thought. Experiencing fear can paradoxically move us more toward courage than cowardice.”

“Did you see what we did?” Vine asked for the thousandth time. “That’s what I’m talking about! Those hell hounds were nothing. When do I get to face a wraith?”

“Once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. But there is all this time inbetween when the vessel cracks open and we finally fall apart. And its only in that time that we can really see one another, because we see out of ourselves, through the cracks, and into theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other.”