"I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks."

"Are lovers ever honest?"

"Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go."

"An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them."

"You can’t get out of getting old. You can’t get out of having a relationship change."

"Bomanz had lived his lies so long he often lied to himself."

"I have seen it before. Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies."

"I said, “I am a soldier, grown old and tired and confused. I have been fighting since before you were born. And I have yet to see anything gained.”"

"You mess with people’s religion and you mess with fire. Even people who don’t much give a damn. Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational."

"One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid. Death is the only exorcism."

"I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my tenure as Annalist. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another."

"Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."

"Nobody knew what the Company wanted. Various witnesses assigned motives according to their own fears. Few came anywhere near the mark."

"Simple minds respond to simple answers."

"Bomanz sighed. A man couldn’t get five minutes alone. What the hell did he get married for? Why did any man? You spent the rest of your life doing hard time, doing what other people wanted, not what you wanted."

"Old folks called the winter a harbinger of worse to come. But old folks always see today’s weather as more harsh than that of yore. Or milder. Never, never the same."

"The essence of sorcery, even for its nonfraudulent practitioners, is misdirection."

"Krage eyed us from a face of stone. “I help you with something, Inquisitor?” “Probably not. You’d lie to me if the truth would save your soul, you bloodsucker.” “Flattery will get you nowhere. What do you want, you parasite?” Tough boy, this Krage. Struck from the same mold as Bullock, but he had drifted into a socially less honored profession. Not much to choose between them I thought. Priest and moneylender."

"Shed swallowed. “That isn’t a plan that does much for my nerves.” “Your nerves aren’t my problem, Shed. They’re yours. You lost them. Only you can find them again.”"

"You try your damnedest, but something always goes wrong. That’s life. If you’re smart, you plan for it."

"I am not religious. I cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity’s frothy carryings-on. I mean, logically, beings of that order just wouldn’t. But maybe there is a force for greater good, created by our unconscious minds conjoined, that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe, being a mindthing, it is not time-bound. Maybe it can see everywhere and everywhen and move pawns so that what seems to be today’s victory becomes the cornerstone of tomorrow’s defeat. Maybe weariness did things to my mind."

"All men are born condemned, so the wise say. All suckle the breast of Death. All bow before that Shadow Monarch. That Lord in Shadow lifts a finger. A feather flutters to the earth. There is no reason in His song. The good go young. The wicked prosper. He is king of the Chaos Lands. His breath stills all souls."

"It was a day ripped full-grown from the womb of despair."

"“Best way out,” Elmo observed laconically, “would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords.” “Sounds a little extreme,” Goblin opined. “But if you want to go first, I’m right behind you.”"

"Only this time it was just a brief rest, till the stars came out. They stared down with mockery in their twinkles, saying all our sweat and blood really had no meaning in the long eye of time. Nothing we did would be recalled a thousand years from now. Such thoughts infected us all. No one had any ideals or glory-lust left. We just wanted to get somewhere, lie down, and forget the war. The war would not forget us."

"The list of cities lost was long and disheartening, even granting exaggeration by the reporters. Soldiers defeated always overestimate the strength of their foe. That soothes egos suspecting their own inferiority."

"Evil is relative, Annalist. You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger."

"I grinned. “The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.”"

"I could not get my feelings straight. I did not believe in evil as an active force, only as a matter of viewpoint, yet I had seen enough to make me question my philosophy. If the Lady were not evil incarnate, then she was as close as made no difference."

"Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?"

"How to argue with sociopathic reasoning? Lisa was the heart of Lisa’s universe. Other people existed only to be exploited."

"“We all do that. In every day life it’s called making excuses.” True, raw motives are too rough to swallow. By the time most people reach my age, they have glossed their motives so often and so well they fall completely out of touch with them."

"I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask."

"He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping."

"You know you’re getting old when everything aggravates you."

"There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight."

"My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion."

"My apprentices were exasperating. They were competing to see who was laziest."

"Fools can make an omen of anything in retrospect."

"He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another."

"Might may not make right, but it makes victory."

"No captive was smart enough to speak a language any of us knew. Talking loud or slow did not help."

"Literacy is sorcery itself in the hinterland."

"“They think you’re a witch. They lost everything because of a witch.” “Stupid thinking.” “Never any shortage of stupid, girl.”"

"I do hope that karma is the keystone of the universe—even if I have to come back as a banana slug myself."

"She had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger. These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?"

"“Locked in darkness that surrounded me like a coffin, I had nothing to distract me from my memories.”"