Glen Cook Quotes

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

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.

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?

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

“What do you want, Blade. Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged, an uncharacteristic action. “There are many evils in the world. I guess I’ve chosen one for my personal crusade.”
“Why such a hatred for priests?”
He didn’t shrug. He didn’t give me a straight answer, either. “If each man picks an evil and attacks it relentlessly, how long can evil persist?”
That was an easy one. Forever. More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way. Few villains think they are villains. But I left him his illusion. If he had one. I doubted he did. No more than a sword’s blade does.

I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask.

Baladitya understands that in addition to being foreign territory the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected people. Symbol and faith serve the rest.

Smeds did not like it. It was getting complicated. He did not like things complicated. Trying to untangle them usually made things worse.

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

It proved to be much farther than I had hoped. It always is when you are running away.

I don’t think she told any lies. She just forgot to tell the whole truth.

You can’t get out of getting old. You can’t get out of having a relationship change.

The road can blunt the most iron will.

He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping.

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