And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.

I had to feel sorry for Bubba’s wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.

But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.” “How do you know that?” “They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.

When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.

There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.

The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.

Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.

People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we’ve been in wars ever since. We’re not a pacific people.

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.