Evil is relative…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.
He'd described himself as looking like a child molester waiting for a chance to strike. He wasn't comfortable with his appearance.
In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.
Closer at hand, the wheeling gulls were as surly and lackadaisical as the day promised to make most men.
No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.
The Hanged Man stopped gesturing and struck a pose: man listening.
You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.
Oh, it's a soldier's life for me. Oh, the adventure and glory! It.
Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony.
I'm going to adopt you. You'd make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think? Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, I think she's right. Excellent! Let's go ask your wicked future mother's opinion.
One-Eye scowled at Goblin. Keep it up, Barf Bag. You'll be grocery shopping with the turtles. What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us. Grinning, One-Eye resumed gabbling with his relatives.
I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true.
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.
I guess I was getting blasé about windwhale-riding.
I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.
I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.
Best way out, Elmo observed laconically, would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords.
We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair.
In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
Over coming days, when I sneaked down to the Buskin, he revealed everything recorded where he appears as the focal character. I do not think I have met many men who disgusted me more. Nastier.
Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then.
Let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent.
I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.
There is nothing so unreasonable and irrational and blind—and just plain silly-looking—as a man who works himself into an obsessive passion.
Justice has nothing to do with it. Stark, bloody, screaming, agonizing vendeance is what I'm talking about.
I had to search a moment before spotting the soft glow advancing along the aisles between enemy divisions. It surrounded a child on a big white horse, bearing a standard of red emblazoned with a white rose.
They steal our yesterdays and leave us no youth but that of our children....
Back to the company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to the annals. Back to fear.
Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.
She is the darkness.
Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.
The price of order, I muttered. I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn't budge.
Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.
This is a favorite game, matching wits with a Raker. 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.
My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.
Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.
If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.
I reserve the right to be unreasonable, inconsistent, and arbitrary in an unreasonable, inconsistent, and arbitrary universe.
Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.
Lightning from a clear sky smote the Necropolitan Hill.
Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By 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 con conjure by existing.
The Lady made a few gestures around Bomanz—who looked pretty moth-eaten—and said a few words in a language I did not understand. Why do sorcerers always use languages nobody understands? Even Goblin and One-Eye do it. Each has confided that he cannot follow the tongue the other uses. Maybe they make it up?
The river barge "Binkey's Sequin" reminded me of a shopkeeper's wife. She was middle-aged, middle class, a little run down, a little overweight, extremely stubborn and set in her ways, needing masterful coaxing and cajoling to get her to give her loving best, but also faithful and warm and unsinkably optimistic in her care for her children.
I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.
Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.
Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.
Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.
I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.
