Glen Cook

One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid. Death is the only exorcism.

All men are born condemned, so the wise say. All suckle the breast of Death.
All bow before that Shadow Monarch. That Lord in Shadow lifts a finger. A feather flutters to the earth. There is no reason in His song. The good go young. The wicked prosper. He is king of the Chaos Lands. His breath stills all souls.

Like most warlords he doesn’t let reality get in the way of his doing whatever he wants to do.

My apprentices were exasperating. They were competing to see who was laziest.

No captive was smart enough to speak a language any of us knew. Talking loud or slow did not help.

There was one temporal power greater than the greatest sorcery. Greed.

Trouble came only where I expected it, from One-Eye, whose motto is that anything not nailed down is his and anything he can pry loose isn’t nailed down.

I do hope that karma is the keystone of the universe—even if I have to come back as a banana slug myself.

The road can blunt the most iron will.

What do you do when old prophecies come true? I’ve never met a priest who honestly expected miracles in his own lifetime. For them miracles are like good wine, best when aged.

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.

Though it might wear a thousand different names in a thousand different times, and might come from a thousand different directions, darkness always comes.

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

If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years.

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.