Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.
Hey," Bozzaris said, "nobody's human." It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of "nobody's perfect" and "I'm only human.
He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?
Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.
Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.
Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?
Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.
All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.
White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.
He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.
How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?
An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.
My wife was a psychiatrist," remarked Pete, "before she became a bruja.
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Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?
Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.