To be with her is a sin, to be without her is a tragedy.

If you look hard enough, you’ll probably find something that makes you wish you hadn’t.

Adjacency to degeneracy means you get most of the fun without having to accept the consequences.

It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because you had power and other people hadn't, too easy to think other people didn't matter much, too easy to think that ideas like right and wrong didn't apply to you.

A murderer should probably do many things, but he should never, under any circumstances, come home.

There’s not a lot of value in preparing for a war, because what happens in a war is unpredictable. But there is a lot of value in preparing for an outbreak, because what happens in an outbreak is predictable.

This is what happens when social media gets weaponised. Real people get hurt.

...bullies are cowards; they hit their wives but are afraid of everyone else.

Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.

All those stories in the news. All those parents. All those mistakes she’d read about. ... Children with stupid, foolish, neglectful parents. Children who died while surrounded by so-called responsible adults. And each time she would pretend to be non-judgmental, but really, deep down she was thinking: Not me. That could never really happen to me.

These whales live lives of quiet desperation and intense boredom. It is the kind of ennui that can be fatal - to both whale and human.