Chapter 29

• “I’m sitting in the Commander’s office, across from him at his desk, in the client position, as if I’m a bank customer negotiating a hefty loan.”
• I add the firelight in.
• The commander likes it when I distinguish myself, like an attentive pet, prick-eared and eager to perform.
• little of that formality remains between us
• This watching is a curiously sexual act.
• “I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If I were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished, if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand up in an alley somewhere”
• “I’m prompting him, playing up to him, drawing him out, and I dislike myself for it, it’s nauseating, in fact. But we are fencing. Either he talks or I will. I know it, I can feel speech backing up inside me.”
• “Women can’t add, he said once, jokingly”
• “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Here, in this context, it’s neither prayer nor command, but a sad graffiti, scrawled once, abandoned.”
• “Have I risked this, made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke?”
• “I force a smile, but it’s all before me now. I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it, here, in this room.”
• “If your dog dies, get another”
• “Things have changed. I have something on him now. What I have on him is the possibility of my own death. What I have on him is his guilt. At last.”
• Dont let the bastards grind you down.
• "Poor girl," he means Cora.
• "I would like to know." [...] "Whatever there is to know," I say; but that's too flippant. "What's going on."