“At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.”

“He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.”

“He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).”

“Nately was instantly up in arms again. "There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!" he declared."Isn't there?" asked the old man. "What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.""Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for.""And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for.”

“It seems to me that if a man can so train himself that he may live honestly and die fearlessly, he has done about as much as is necessary.”

“It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.”