"My friend Didier says that praisng people behind their back in monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourselves against is the good that people say about you"

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time and space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

Each day when the men prayed, I knelt with them in silence. And at night, enclosed within the breathing, snoring swathe of their soldier-scented sleep - smells of wood-smoke, gun oil, cheap sandalwood soap, piss, shit, sweat soaking into wet-serge, unwashed human and horse hair, liniment and saddle-softerner, cumin and coriander, peppermint tooth powder, chai, tobacco, and a hundred others- I dreamed with them of homes and hearts we longed to see again.

It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out is a part of the universal good. It's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their mind in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blows away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women. You know that's true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into the battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you it's true when you watch them die. If he's near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he'll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley or the plain. If he's a long way from home, he'll think about it, and hell talk about it. He'll talk about his village or his hometown, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won't scream of causes. At the very last, he'll murmur or he'll call out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it's a woman, and a city.

If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn't believe that... I didn't know then, as I do know, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.

There wasn't any glory in it. There never is. There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way - the Geneva Convention exist for that reason - and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, poloticians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

I love money, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards.

And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.

There are a few things more discomforting that a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency for someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason.

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Push our brave hearts in to the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing:l the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

posted at 1:33 AM

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