Glen Cook

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

"Ever since childhood I have suspected you get along better if you respect people’s ways and wishes regardless of your apparent relative strengths. That doesn’t mean you let people walk on you. It doesn’t mean you eat their pain for them. You need to demand respect for yourself, too."

"I guess you don’t need to agree on everything to be lovers."

"Man, woman and child, the people of Shadowcatch were privy to the one true secret of the universe: there is always a darker shadow lurking beyond the one whose face you can see."

"The world sure isn’t kind to the man who tries to be gentle and thoughtful."

"“She was stronger than the gods who created her?” “Guys, I didn’t make this stuff up. Don’t ask me to rationalize it. Goblin, you’ve been everywhere. You ever seen a religion that can’t be picked to shreds by any nonbeliever with brains enough to tie his own bootlaces?"

"He talks big about his goddess getting involved but I won’t count on that. I’ve never seen the gods actually take a hand in mortal affairs."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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 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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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?"

"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.”"

"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."

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

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

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

"“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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"“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."

"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."