It’s an odd thing to be sad about someone in death that you never really cared for in life and a thing that chooses its own moment to sneak up on you – usually.

A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us – a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.

Darkness is patient, always waiting for its chance, and swift to take it.

I turned to the guard. “Keep her here, Rodrick. Unless she comes up with a plan to destroy the remainder of the enemy. In which case you’re to let her do it.

Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.

Nothing paralyses a man so well as choice.

Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules,... but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route. Lies are complex things. Best not to bother thinking in terms of truth or lie-let necessity be your mother... and invent!

There is an unwritten rule of tube travel, understood instinctively by every Londoner from young schoolboy to doddering ancient. You pretend it’s not happening. You pretend that half a dozen strangers are not squeezing against you to a degree that is usually reserved for orgies.

They say God watches us in every moment. But I think, in some moments, when some deeds are done, he turns his face away.

The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will some day do to you.