Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people.

Engaging spy thriller in the post-9/11 world, with a good helping of the assumptions and politics from that time. So, be aware of that, I guess. This is not my usual kind of book - spy thrillers tend to be all about Male Heroism! and Complex Political Machinations! and Sweeping Historical/Cultural Generalizations! and Some Extraneous Violence, Often Torture, for Good Measure! and this one did, indeed, have all those elements. But it’s also just good storytelling and the way the book is laid out you get all these excellent individual stories that come together (too neatly? Sure. But come on. That’s kind of the point) in one big story. I enjoyed it.

After six months it was done—hundreds of thousands of words, all annotated and checked. I felt the washing out of my earlier life was complete—I had written the final chapter on that era and sent it downstream like a funeral barge into the past.

She knew, even in marriage, if you advanced too far to please the other person it let them edge away and you ended up always laughing and fighting and screwing on their territory. Sometimes you had to stand your ground and make them come to you—just to keep the equilibrium.

They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.

Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people.

He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them.

Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.