Glen Cook Quotes

The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.

Nobody had any ideas. The questions just sort of lay there like dead fish too ripe to be ignored and too big to shove out of the way.

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

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.

I began to back away.
This is how I handle my women. Duck for cover when they get distressed.

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.

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.

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

Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance.

He winced. “You’ll start a civil war.”
“Not if everybody behaves and minds his own business.”
“You don’t understand. Priests consider everything their business.”

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.

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.

Never underestimate the power of human ingratitude.

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

He hadn’t been religious. He’d believed that death was it. When you died you were dead, like a squished bug or drowned rat, and your immortality was in the minds of those you left behind.