“This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.”

“All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green.”

“It's like this," Nana says. "All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green.”

“Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.”

“Lesson number one, she muttered, love is beyond your grasp. Lesson two: nowhere is it written that you're guaranteed fairness. And three: there's only right and wrong.”

“You can only pretend that you're already dead and thus free yourself up to focus on three things: 1) finding and killing the enemy, 2) communicating the situation and resulting actions to adjacent units and higher headquarters, and 3) triaging and treating your wounded. If you love your men, you naturally think about number three first, but if you do you're wrong. The grim logic of combat dictates that numbers one and two take precedence.”