Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting. - Iain Banks

He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.