David Baldacci

It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.

Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget.

It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.

Pender laughed. "Verify? In this day and age? Who cares about verifying anything? It's all about the speed. Who gets there first defines the truth. You know that as well as any man living.

You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.

But the fact is, as one grows close to death, the only thing that matters is family. I hope you can see that.

Can't say a body ever gets used to hard work

Politics is a dirty, ruthless business, Agent Robie. It makes the intelligence sector look relatively honorable by comparison.

But then he put aside the awkward encounter, which his mind allowed him to do quite easily. He could compartmentalize at an astonishing level. It came from not giving a shit.

-__ remember my father telling me about England__ redrawing of India__ boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused._-__ou keep proving my point, Tom, that we__e rotten to the core._-__y point is we never learn!

I__e fought for and against pretty much every cause there is. There will always be war of some kind. At first it was over fertile soil and good water, then precious metal and then the most popular version of human disagreement, __y God is better than your God._ Whether you draw your faith from Jeremiah and Jesus, Allah and Muhammad or Brahma and Buddha, it doesn__ matter. Someone will tell you you__e wrong, and he__l fight you over it. Me, I believe in aliens, and to hell with all earthly gods. In the grand scheme of a trillion planets in the universe we__e just not that damn important anyway. And humans are rotten to the core.

I remember my father telling me about England__ redrawing of India__ boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.___ou keep proving my point, Tom, that we__e rotten to the core.___y point is we never learn!

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

For DeHaven it was well worth the extra money to a federal budget that had always allocated more to war than it ever did to peaceful purposes. For a fraction of the cost of one missile he could purchase on the open market every work the library needed to round out its rare books collection. Yet politicians believed that missiles kept you safe, whereas actually books did, and for a simple reason. Ignorance caused wars, and people who read widely were seldom ignorant.

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.

She glanced around at the tombstones. __ou__e surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job.___ou see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones.

The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.