"“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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Soldiers live. And wonder why."

"This is what happens when you get old. You start thinking. Worse, you start telling everybody what you think."

"I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely."

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

"It proved to be much farther than I had hoped. It always is when you are running away."

"Time is the most wicked of all villains."

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

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

"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."

"“It would take an entire nation a thousand years to build something this vast. No monument so huge can be a good thing.” “I don’t understand.” “Only a very great evil could remain so single of purpose, so uncaring of cost, as to create something so ultimately useless.”"

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

"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."

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

"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."

"It is a saying of my people. Even Water sleeps. But Enemy never rests."

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

"Somebody a lot smarter than me once said, “Put no trust in wizards.”"

"“I still got all my limbs and I’m still breathing.” “Makes you a winner in the soldiering game.”"

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

"Baladitya understands that in addition to being foreign territory the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected people. Symbol and faith serve the rest."

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"The only thing that comes easy is trouble."

"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 reminded myself that Khang Phi is bereft of arms. That the monks abhor violence. That they always yield to strength, then seduce it with reason and wisdom. Yes, sometimes it does take a while."

"She—and I—were of an age now where we spent too much time wondering how things might have gone had we made a few different choices."

"“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.”"

"“Don’t even think about it, horse. I have friends in the glue business. Get up.” They got. Unlike women, you can show horses who is boss."

"People don’t want to be told to do right. They don’t really want to do right. They want to do whatever they want—and whine that it’s not fair, it’s not their fault, when it comes time to pay the piper."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The sky? Dark as the inside of a priest’s heart, isn’t it?"