The Lies of Locke Lamora

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

“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.

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

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.

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