"Before the next minute had passed, they had all fallen to the ground. Just like that. As though someone had reached inside and turned off a switch.'What happened?' Matt asked, gasping.I went from one person to the next, trying to wake them up, but they were all dead, wrote Daft Donald."

"I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is."

"There is a saying that when someone is struck down without warning that he 'didn't know what hit him.' It's a bit of a copout, providing the excuse that what happened wasn't the individual's fault at all. That it couldn't have been avoided and no one is to blame.Frankly, that's just a bunch of hokey horseshit."

"One of the key issues all veterans face is making the transition to a civilian career, and for veterans who need extra medical attention, this can be even more difficult."

"Then, almost as an afterthought, she turned and locked the bathroom door. If he thought he was going to seduce her, make her stupid enough to believe his lies by getting her into bed, he'd better think again. She stepped into the water. Besides, women didn't lose brain cells at the thought of sex. Only men did."

"But the purpose and nature are never clearly revealed. Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable."