Randall Moore

“The gunfire had brought the attention of the bouncers upstairs. We took position at the bottom of the stairs. I told the girls to stay behind us and ran to the top of the stairs. The door opened and I was looking into the face of one of the Thai bouncers. He looked at my gun and started to turn. I grabbed him by the collar and held him in front of me. He was unarmed, but the others weren’t. They opened fire, killing their compatriot as I returned fire, killing one. Fortunately for me the three other guys on my side, Jim, Miguel and Frank came up behind me and cut the other armed men down in a hail of bullets. There was a commotion in the main room of the brothel as I cracked the door open. Four men with guns were walking toward the door. Miguel joined me as I flung it open. We each had two pistols in our hands. I fired one weapon after the other at the two men to the left while Miguel did the same to the two men on our right. The smoke of cordite was swirling into the room like deadly incense. People were screaming and huddling by the walls. Jim and Frank led the girls into the front room."
from "The Noble Heart”
― Randall Moore

“Like all the great nobles of the period, he rode and fought to perfection. But unlike most of the Grands, his scholastic education hadn’t been overlooked. Porthos pretended to understand the scraps of Latin that Aramis deployed, but Athos just smiled at them. Two or three times, to the great astonishment of his friends, he’d even caught Aramis in some fundamental error and restored a verb to its proper tense or a noun to its case. On top of all this, his integrity was irreproachable, in a century when men of war routinely trampled on the dictates of conscience and religion, lovers behaved without the least delicacy or decorum, and the poor roundly ignored God’s seventh commandment.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“The crowd bowed their heads and listened to the chaplain recite a brief prayer—vague and generic enough to offend no one, which, of course, resulted in offending almost everyone.”
― Brian Andrews, Tier One

“He could breach and clear a room while picking out guitar chords in his head for a new country song, but this simple technique required all his attention.”
― Brian Andrews, Tier One