Bradley Knott

“When we say that this definition of good and evil is universally acceptable, what we mean is that any rational and reasonable person—any rational and reasonable Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Christian or Jew or any atheist, for that matter—can accept that this is a reasonable definition of good and evil, because it is based on what we know about how the universe works.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards. Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man. It’s not the kind of personal history you forget.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

“rival politician once called Harding’s verbiage “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis