You have to understand something about girls, Mick. You see 'em in the winner's circle, but you'll never find horseshit on their shoes.

But that was the war for you. It was inconvenient, senseless, and it had placed Maurice Mickelwhite directly in the path of two thousand German bombers.

Bloke was a savage. On the pitch and in the sky. But his savagery wouldn't save him. He had flown too many missions and the numbers would catch up with him soon. They always did.

It wasn’t fair, but maybe Tommy was right on that score. Maybe a man didn’t have no right to ask for fair. Maybe a man made fair for himself.

Hell is full of polite men with bone saws.

He looked like an idol consecrated to the gods of arrogance. Damned if I would bow.

The course she was on was as fixed and unalterable as the trajectory of a bullet, but you could see she did not believe that. No one in the life ever believed it. They saw a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people precede them into the trap, saw how unvarying and pitiless the end was, and with all that fresh in their minds they did the same, of their own free will.

Breese was one of those people who thought of civilization as sitting atop the earth like a man on a throne, and not like a weed that had thrust itself up through a crack in the sidewalk.

Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart.

Pain could be controlled. Its debts could be deferred. But there were other debts that could not be deferred. Debts of honor. Debts of love.