Dale Bailey

“All writers are unregenerate thieves, and the ones who deny it are also liars.”

“I believed then – and I believe still – that fiction driven by purely ideological goals is likely to be very poor fiction indeed.”

““The pagan myths are everywhere once you know to look,” she said, “even the ecumenical calendar. Easter is May Day in Christian garb, and All Saints Day falls right after Halloween, the Druid holiday of Samhain.” She raised her eyebrows. “The old gods never die, they just put on new faces.””

“The wall clock ticked, dividing the silence into discrete segments of discomfort.”

“But it did not matter. An old lesson from the marines came back to me, a lesson from the hunt: you must never empathize with the enemy. You must kill him without fear or emotion, because if you do not he will certainly kill you. You must believe this, even if it is not true.”

“He wasn’t the first man who had sought to prevent violence through the use of violence, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.I wasn’t sure I didn’t like it either.”

““I ain’t afraid of nothin.”“You’re a bigger fool than I took you for, then.””

“You have to understand. The Germans were awful, they were often evil. But they were right in what they did that night, because those men, they had broken a taboo that should not ever be broken. And they had to be punished because unless you punish the people who do wrong, society falls apart. You can understand why those men did what they did, but people have to be punished or we’ll have chaos.”

“Back then, I’d asked Mama if she ever longed to see the world, and what she’d said in response had puzzled me. I’ve seen it, Kemp, she’d told me. It’s overrated.I didn’t have much doubt that she was right. But all the same, I thought, I probably ought to find out for myself.”

““You ever want to get away? You ever want to see the world?”“I’ve seen it, Kemp. It’s overrated.””

“When it comes to death, sex, and money, everybody lies.”

“I had broken the first commandment of political life, a commandment I had flogged relentlessly for the last year. Stay on message, stick to the talking points.Thou shalt not speak from the heart.”

“You must never run away from the truth, Jake, however unpleasant. Because once you begin running, you can never stop.”

“I am reminded of this now, for recollection, like archaeology, is a matter of sifting through ruins. Memory is frail and untrustworthy, tainted by desire; what evidence remains is fragmentary, shrouded in the mystery of the irretrievable past. You cannot recover history; you can only reconstruct it, build it anew from the shards that have survived, searching always for the seams between the strata, those places of demarcation between the city that was and the city that would be, between the self that you were and the self that you have become.”