“It was the eighth day of recruiting and Staff Sergeant Aragan sat blearyeyed behind his desk as yet another whelp was prodded forward by the corporal. They’d had some luck here in Kan. Fishing’s best in the backwaters, Kan’s Fist had said. All they get around here is stories. Stories don’t make you bleed. Stories don’t make you go hungry, don’t give you sore feet. When you’re young and smelling of pigshit and convinced there ain’t a weapon in all the damn world that’s going to hurt you, all stories do is make you want to be part of them. ” – Steven Erikson, The Gardens of the Moon

“When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end. ” – Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“Hell? You don’t know what Hell is. None of you people do. Hell isn’t getting beat up or cut up or hauled in front of some faggot jury. Hell is waking up every god damn morning and not knowing why you’re even here. Why you’re even breathing.” – Frank Miller, sin City

“Because we humans are a reflection of God. and that can lead you into the temptation of believing that you understand everything, of imagining that you know everything.” – Julia Navarro, The Bible of Clay

“To be truthful I am not entirely sure what people mean when they talk of happiness. There are moments of joy and laughter, the comfort of friendship, but enduring happiness?” – David Gemmell, Troy: The Lord of the Silver Bow

“We make choices everyday, some of them good, some of them bad. And – if we are strong enough – we live with the consequences.” – David Gemmell, Troy: The Lord of the Silver Bow

“The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.” – John Connolly, The Killing Kind

“There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. that, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in the world beyond this one.” – John Connolly, The Killing Kind

“There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be because dipping into it costs, and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you, each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depth, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from the dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you’re lost forever.” – John Connolly, The Killing Kind

“This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for his life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stone waterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning.

The present is imperfectly layered on the past; it does not conform flawlessly at every point. things fall and die and their decay creates new layers, thickening the surface crust and adding another thin membrane to cover what lies beneath, new worlds resting on the remains of the old. Day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, layers are added and the imperfections multiply. The past never truly does. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now. We stumble into it occasionally, all of us, through remembrance and recall. We summon to mind former lovers, lost children, departed parents, the wonder of a single day when we captured, however briefly, the ineffable, fleeting beauty of the world. These are our memories. We hold them close and call them ours, and we can find them when we need them.

But sometimes that choice is made for us: a piece of the present simply falls away, and the past is exposed like old bone. Afterward, nothing can ever be the same again, and we are forced to reassess the form of what we believed to be true in the light of new revelations about its substance. The truth is revealed by a misstep and the sudden sense that something beneath our feet rings false. The past bubbles out like molten lava, and lives turn to ash in its path.” – John Connolly, The Killing Kind