Stephen Sweet

“When God created fools he put the biggest of them into uniform and gave them helmets to prevent any thoughts entering their heads,’ Sidney Grice said, his face almost drained with anger, as Inspector Pound turned on him.”
― M.R.C. Kasasian, The Mangle Street Murders

“Pain is the coin they use now in all their transactions. Nothing else teaches them, nothing else will satisfy them.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.”
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily

“They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
― George Orwell, 1984