“People enjoy sitting back knowing they won't hear a lot of four-letter words. ”

“At first I wanted to be a jockey. I rode horses in Cleveland but I kept falling off and I was afraid of horses. So there wasn't much of a future in it. ”

“Murder is such a charged word. You know how some people fixate and won't let things go? They're called cops. ”

“One man can defeat a whole army with words alone”

“What I feel inspired to write today is this deep emotional dissatisfaction with the reality of our times--corruption of government--fake people--sick values--and unconscious people living meaningless lives”

“You know people like this, right? People who are incapable of enjoying anything.”

“Michael Freeman was thirty-five years old – a former Special Forces soldier turned policeman. He was a tall and slim black man, with grey-flecked hair and dark almond-shaped eyes. His smile was tight-lipped – half knowing and half strategic. It hid a mouthful of craggy teeth. A childhood in Detroit's East Side with an aggressive, alcoholic father had taught him to play things close to his chest, to look and listen. His colleagues knew him as a patient thinker, sedulous, missing nothing given time. Intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded, he exuded certitude. In Afghanistan, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he spent several weeks as a mounted outlier with the Northern Alliance in the Alma Tak Mountains, beyond the range of reinforcement or rescue – drinking filtered ditchwater and eating nuts scavenged from corpses – and calling down massive airstrikes on Taliban positions. He gained a certain reputation. Word spread the length of the Darya Suf River valley, through the Tiangi Gap to the stronghold at Mazar-i-Sharif that there was a monster loose in the mountains and the Taliban called him ‘bor-buka', which seemed to mean black or devil or whirlwind, and, at times, all of these things.”