Terry Hayes

I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn__ quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.

In war, the first casualty is truth.

People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.

The world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.

I have heard people say love is weak but they're wrong--love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things--patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love--the epic and the small, the noble and the base--the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.

The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone.

A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn't smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strenght, not weakness (...)

There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you - just listen to them.

The interior of the arms dealer's private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs.