"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."

"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."

"“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."

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

"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."

"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."

"She had a full measure of youth’s indifference to the past."

"Seemed to have made peace with the bad times. Some manage that with comparative ease. Others remain crippled for life. Those are not the sort who remain soldiers. They become ex-soldiers and get intimate with wine or poppies."

"“I don’t get the Kina story. If she died back at the beginning of the world, how could she be giving us trouble for the last twenty or thirty years?” “It’s religion, dimwit,” Goblin barked. “It don’t got to make sense.”"

"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."

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

"The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing."

"Desperate people will do what they must to survive. Only a fool would expect the results to be pretty."

"Time is the most wicked of all villains."

"Like most villains, he was wicked only most of the time and mainly in small-minded ways."

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

"I picked up my five cards from the next deal. “This ain’t a hand, it’s a foot.”"

"We are not really a godless bunch. We are just the sort who ignore the gods—probably in the unconscious hope that the gods will not notice us."

"Sadly, after years of study, I realize that most history may pivot on personal considerations like that, not on the pursuit of ideals dark or shining."

"Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said—particularly if it bore any vaguely education hue—was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age. And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good."

"Life is never like a canal, flowing gently through a straightforward and predictable channel. It is more like a mountain brook, zigging and zagging, tearing things up, sometimes going almost dormant before taking an unexpected and turbulent turn."

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

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

"All is not lost. But neither is it found."

"The best of the diviner breed are never wrong because they never set anything in stone."

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

"Death will find a way. Even the gods must pass."

"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."

"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."

"They (i. e., the peasants) could imagine no future more grim than their past."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"We are all the sum total of our pasts, good and evil."

"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."

"I must be driven. I figured that as long as I had to stay out there I ought to keep scouting around. Working in my sleep. Ought to have the Old Man double my pay. How much is two times a stab in the back?"

"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."

"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."

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