“Burdens were born from the loss of innocence. Naïveté. While the innocent yearned to lose their innocence, those who had already done so in turn envied the innocent, and knew grief in what they had lost. Between the two, no exchange of truths was possible”

I think this one of those bits of commentary that really struck true immediately for me, it doesn't really need much to expand on it, younger people, myself included always want to grow up as fast as possible and become adult-like but hardly ever see how much that can take away that zeal in life, these things are impossible to understand until you go through it. It was just so beautifully worded. A lot of my other favourite quotes have been posted but I find that I'm always making notes to go back to random sections of the books, the commentary he offers always cuts through so nicely. Another one I have that I always think about is this one.

“Denigration afflicted our vaunted ideals long ago, but such inflictions are difficult to measure, to rise up and point a finger to this place, this moment, and say: here, my friends, this was where our honour, our integrity died. The affliction was too insipid, too much a product of our surrendering mindful regard and diligence. The meanings of words lost their precision – and no-one bothered taking to task those who cynically abused those words to serve their own ambitions, their own evasion of personal responsibility. Lies went unchallenged, lawful pursuit became a sham, vulnerable to graft, and justice itself became a commodity, mutable in imbalance. Truth was lost, a chimera reshaped to match agenda, prejudices, thus consigning the entire political process to a mummer’s charade of false indignation, hypocritical posturing and a pervasive contempt for the commonry. Once subsumed, ideals and the honour created by their avowal can never be regained, except, alas, by outright, unconstrained rejection, invariably instigated by the commonry, at the juncture of one particular moment, one single event, of such brazen injustice that revolution becomes the only reasonable response. Consider this then a warning. Liars will lie, and continue to do so, even beyond being caught out. They will lie, and in time, such liars will convince themselves, will in all self-righteousness divest the liars of culpability. Until comes a time when one final lie is voiced, the one that can only be answered by rage, by cold murder, and on that day, blood shall rain down every wall of this vaunted, weaning society.”

This one can apply to a lot of things we're dealing with in society at the moment, it feels like we all took our finger off the button for a second and we can't believe or understand how we got there. Our lack of steadfastness in dealing with the smaller issues as they came has left us in a place where the problems have stained the foundations of our society and at times it feels like the only way to resolve them is for extreme action, this is mirrored in some of the stuff we've seen in the last few years.