The Lies of Locke Lamora

You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid.

Hard lessons were handed out. As many men learned to their sorrow, it’s impossible to be intimidating when one angry woman has your cock between her teeth and another is holding a stiletto to your kidneys.

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?

Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.

In time, you’ll come to understand that a state like ours cannot afford to offer up a show of weakness for honesty’s sake; Duke Nicovante charges me with vouchsafing his security, not his conscience.

“This entire situation is insane.” Jean slammed his book shut in disgust.

“It was insane before; now it’s become malicious.”

I’m sure we can communicate. I speak fluent hatchet.

“‘Commonly thought,’ you say? Many things are commonly thought, but perhaps not commonly thought all the way through.”

“Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?”

“A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems.”

When you’re a priest, people tend to see the robe rather than the man.

I can’t live forever. Each time something like this affair lands in my lap, I suddenly recall that I don’t want to live forever.

Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn’t it?

It was strange, how readily authority could be conjured with nothing but a bit of strutting jackassery.

Our patron has always sort of danced upon the notion that austerity and piety go hand in hand; down here, we show our appreciation for things by appreciating, if you get me.

There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.