"There are, of course, a thousand sophistries spewed by those who wish to deny individuals the opportunity to choose. Which is an arrogant presumption of a divine scale."

"There are several huge monasteries—of which Khang Phi is the greatest—dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. The monks do not sort it into good and evil knowledge, nor do they make moral judgments. They take the position that no knowledge is evil until someone chooses to do evil with it."

"It looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down."

"He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.”"

"An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people."

"The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you."

"Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance."

"No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don’t believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness."

"Hatreds seldom are constrained to rational scales."

"“Used to be” is not worth the breeze on which it is scribbled."

"If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years."

"“When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.” Santaraksita smiled sourly, “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.” He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs. And that is a truth upon which you can rely."

"Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable."

"I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much."

"Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true."

"Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out."

"And there went some good old-fashioned wishful thinking, Sleepy. We were talking about human beings. If there is any way to be contrary, unreasonable and obnoxious, human beings are sure to find and pursue it. With verve and enthusiasm at whatever might be the most inconvenient time."

"Beneath my breath I continued my conversation with God. As usual, He did not trouble Himself to defend His Works to me. My fault for being a woman."

"You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind."

"I sped a prayer heavenward. God needs to be reminded."

"“We’re still the Black Company. We still don’t leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coinage itself says bad money will drive out good. The same is true of principles, ethics and rules of conduct. If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possible remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient."

"Soldiers live. And wonder why."

"Peace had broken out and was being enthusiastically exploited on the presumption that it could not possibly last."

"You might have noticed that the human animal is fond of forming and clinging to prejudices, remaining their steadfast curator in the face of all reason and contradiction."

"The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it."

"Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water."

"Not dangerous at all. Not even that lucky. But a sufficiently paranoid mind will discern patterns and threats where only fortune has conspired."

"That was not supposed to happen. It was unthinkable, supposedly. And for ordinary people that was mostly true. But not so at a level where men began to believe that they existed outside the usual rules."

"Though it might wear a thousand different names in a thousand different times, and might come from a thousand different directions, darkness always comes."

"I have always found the religious tolerance of the southerners amazing and disconcerting, though it was really only an ancient habit predicated on the fact that no religious community was strong enough to show the rest the errors in their thinking at swordspoint."

"Time has a way of blunting the sharpest edge of determination."

"Ignorance is a chink in the armor a knowledgeable enemy can exploit at will."

"He jumped down, started waving his arms around while he went to squeaking and squealing in one of those languages wizards use so the rest of us will think there is something terribly strange and mystical about what they do, kind of like lawyers."

"But how do you get rid of a god? Is there any religion where they teach you that? How to get your god off your back if he gets too damned obnoxious? No. All you ever get is advice on how to bribe them to leave you alone for a few minutes."

"He knew that he had screwed up but he was the kind of guy who, after he shoots his mouth off, cannot back down or admit any failing. The world is full of those people. All of us would be better off if their fathers would strangle them as soon as they showed signs of being that way. This particular fool was willing to sacrifice an army rather than admit his error."

"The soldiers stumbled forward doggedly, cursing the bite of the wind while reminding one another that generals are seldom of sound mind and unbesmirched ancestry. They would not be generals if they were."

"He had a distinct problem imagining minds working differently from his own."

"That was not an exaggeration, that was an outright fabrication."

"He had gained all the power he had dreamed of then—and had not known a moment of peace since."

"Rage is a red, near-animate force, as bloated with compassion as a starving serpent."

"You are a hired sword. A soldier. You should not be playing philosophical games. Not even with yourself."

"I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of them was ingenious to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and female do. But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from the same dichotomy."

"The poor idiot is a living testimonial to the fact that everything takes longer and costs more. Even magic can’t get you around that."

"It is a chance to flit off and double-check my memory, which I have found to be astonishingly unreliable. Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking we have invested."

"I heard Mather’s blather but it did not register as sense. I uttered, “Tooga ain’t no crazier than any other religion around here.” That seemed to offend everyone equally. Good."

"You can blame a wizard for anything and people will believe you."

"Those soldiers hacked and slashed. Their faces were distorted with the horror of their actions but they were out of control, far past the point where they could stop. The flicker of firelight made everything seem more hellish and surreal. I had seen this before. I had seen my own brothers this way, a few times, back in the north. The blood smell takes control and kills the mind and deadens the soul and there is nothing human left."

"Fickle folk. A little hunger and stress and they forgot all about liberty."

"For once he was as serious as a spear through the gut."