When one searches any place, be it a gypsy caravan or a baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the proces… - Alistair MacLean's Death Train

To all things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn.

I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before. I was never to feel so good again.

A terrified rat will swear to anything.