“He hated himself for deceiving her, pretending everything was going to be all right.”

To them he was scum; to himself he was something far worse.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

He'd spent an awful lot of time dwelling on the past, old hurts, old sins, but it was all in vain. There was no undoing them . . .

“Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing.”

“For as long as he can remember, Rashton expected to die young. In a dark alley, or on a battlefield, a place beyond light and comfort, beyond friendship, his situation hopeless. He knew how sharp the edges of his life had become, and he’d made peace with it, because he knew he’d die fighting.”

And isn't it natural for people to behave badly when they feel hopeless?

It was silly, but it still weighed heavily on his heart all these years later. His heart was the repository of guilt. It was crammed now, painfully swollen with sins and misdemeanours. He fully expected it to burst any day. They could put 'guilt' on his death certificate rather than 'myocardial infarction.'

“I couldn’t be sure if I had moved forward or fallen behind, or if I was just circling over the same spot.”

“It’s funny, but when I’m doing nothing, I get this feeling like I’m fighting something… It never goes away, even when I’m in bed, even when I’m walking around.”