Tangled Mind

... every time I thought of [what they found] my mind ran aground on the flat, stunning, unbudging reality of it; there didn’t seem to be any way to think beyond or around it. It reminded me, with a deep sickening lurch in my stomach, of my few memories from right after the attack: disconnected images stripped of any context or meaning, only and vastly and unthinkably themselves... [loc. 3021]

When a country is torn in two, it splits in surprising zigzags, and it is hard to guess who will find themselves on one side and who on the other. There were stories of families divided, friends taking up arms against each other, towns where neighbour warred against neighbour. [loc. 1246]

I’d struck my boy and now we were all in this great sucking bog. Tom was in it with us. There was nowhere to go with all that. Nowhere at all. All the years of work to make things right, to save the farm, to get us back to where we were, before it all, come to nought. For so long I’d kept Kabwe apart from Vale and me. No need to have any of that coming back here with us and start to unsettle things and yet here it was sitting in the car with us, squatting in the road half dead and needing to be run down. [loc. 1427]

Master says we must kill all of them. Honey says this is because we are on a covert operation. Bees concurs. Dragon doesn't care now he has neutralised his target. I don't care because I am doing what Master wants and Master will be happy with me. I am Rex. I am a Good Dog.

"You can do magic, Peter ... you can shoot fireballs out of your fingers and your girlfriend is a river. That kind of shit. Like possessed BMWs and just all of it. All of that shit."
"That's different," I said. "That shit is real." [loc. 1955]

"...I don't deny that, by the singing of Mass, the sick are healed, daily, and ghosts are laid to rest, and the walking dead appeased. I've seen this... I do deny that this has anything to do with a Deity! Nothing about it demands a god in explanation." [p. 41]

... 'They’ll never believe you’re not under my control. They’ll think I contaminated you. Maybe they’ll think I laid eggs in you. Or that I’ll burst out of your chest. Or other gross things. They’ll— '
“Shut up,” Riley ordered, chilled by the utter belief and gnawing horror in McClane’s voice. No surrender. [loc 4558]

‘Diaries don’t tell you what people think. Just what they think they think.' [loc. 2556]

"I know it's not Latin because obscenity was the sole aspect of my classical studies to which I paid attention. I believe the word there is irrumare," Philip added, somewhat smugly.
"Fellare," Guy corrected without thinking.
"I'm sure Catullus has irrumare."
"He does, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing."
Philip's grin was an evil joy. "You really will have to explain the distinction." [loc. 2691]

I’ve been told things happen as they should: My grandmother fell in love three times before her nineteenth birthday. My mother found love with the neighbor boy when she was six. And I, I was born with wings, a misfit who didn’t dare to expect something as grandiose as love. [p. 56]