David Eddings Quotes

You don't have to be so apologetic with me, Bheid," Althalus told him. "I'm very tolerant about things like that. I gather that your murderers are on a salary of some kind?" "A yearly retainer with a bonus for each murder, yes." "Then they aren't just assorted fanatics who kill for their God?" "Good heavens no! Fanatics want to be captured and executed. That makes them martyrs, and martyrs are rewarded in heaven. Our assassins are thoroughgoing professionals who never get caught." "Good policy. Never hire amateurs when you can get professionals.

If you’d keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you, you wouldn’t hear so much that offends you.

There’s a girl who can probably cut glass with her voice from a mile away [...] Andine’s got the kind of voice you can’t really ignore.

You're forcing me to violate one of my most sacred vows."
"Oh, I'm sorry. We won't do it that way then. We'll just kill everybody in this part of Kweron instead. You'll be standing waist-deep in blood, but your soul will be all nice and clean. Won't that make you proud?"
"Monstrous!"
"It's entirely up to you, Bheid. You can either be a swindler or a butcher. Take your pick.

You want gold, I suppose? she asked in an accusatory tone.
“Oh, gold’s all right, I suppose, but I’d really rather get paid in love. Love can’t be counted, so it’s probably even more valuable than gold.”

Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

The fate of man might very well depend on what we’re doing. He’s doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but it’s still the right thing.

The Queen of Night was in full voice when Althalus and the others reached the battlements on the eastern side of the city, and her catapults were hurling boulders at the walls of Mawor with a monotonous thudding sound. “I’m starting to get a bellyful of that,” Duke Nitral growled. “I spent a fortune on that marble sheathing on the outer wall, and she’s breaking it all to pieces with those accursed engines. Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m going to do something about that right now.” He went on down the parapet to a cluster of peculiar-looking engines. “What are those things?” Eliar asked curiously.
“Nitral calls them arbalests,” Koleika replied. “They’re sort of an oversized bow. They’ll throw a spear for half a mile. Nitral and I’ve come up with a way to make life very interesting for those catapult crews out there.”
Duke Nitral barked a sharp command to the men around the arbalests, and a sheet of spears trailing fire shot out in long arcs from the high walls of Mawor.

I don’t like to contaminate a good story with truth, Em. That’d be a violation of my artistic integrity, wouldn’t it?

“That information is not supposed to be in the hands of the general population. Ordinary people aren’t equipped to deal with it.”
“Ordinary people are probably much wiser than you think they are, Reverend [...] Every family has a few black sheep. There’s nothing really unusual about it.

Surely you don't agree with that apostate!"
"I was talking about his skill, not his message, Aleikon ... He's good. There's no question about that.

Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?
“When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.”
What gave you the absurd idea that [the world]’s broken?
“It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.”
[...] Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.

I’ve seen this all before, Althalus ... many, many times. An idea that’s born in glory starts to tarnish almost immediately.

Delegating authority seems unnatural to women. First they tell you to do something, and then they keep sticking their noses into it while you’re trying to do it, and all they’re really doing is getting in the way.

‘Labor contractor’ sounds so much nicer than ‘slave trader,’ wouldn’t you say?