The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, 512 pages
"How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?"
"If you are strong enough to to face enemy bullets, you should be strong enough to hear them out."
"You want the pain to be simple, straightforward -- you don't want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways each morning, when you're getting up to do something else -- brush your teeth or eat your breakfast..."
"[I]f there was any tenet on which he'd wanted to build his life , it was that of never giving in to self-pity."
"This was what happiness was [--] your mind transformed into your body, your body instinct with the joy in your mind; this sensation of reality having met its end."
"How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?"
"If you are strong enough to to face enemy bullets, you should be strong enough to hear them out."
"You want the pain to be simple, straightforward -- you don't want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways each morning, when you're getting up to do something else -- brush your teeth or eat your breakfast..."
"[I]f there was any tenet on which he'd wanted to build his life , it was that of never giving in to self-pity."
"This was what happiness was [--] your mind transformed into your body, your body instinct with the joy in your mind; this sensation of reality having met its end."