Glen Cook Quotes

Are lovers ever honest?

I grinned. “The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.”

I guess you don’t need to agree on everything to be lovers.

Will, Lady. The Will will reign triumphant. My husband had said that often, confident that nothing could resist his will.
He had believed that right up to the moment I killed him.

Evil is relative, Annalist. 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.

There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.

There are, of course, a thousand sophistries spewed by those who wish to deny individuals the opportunity to choose. Which is an arrogant presumption of a divine scale.

Blade grumbled about the absurdities of the theological imagination and why didn’t people have sense enough to smother would-be priests in their cradles?

He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.”

He had a distinct problem imagining minds working differently from his own.

Exact words were of no consequence. At heart the squabble was as old as humanity itself, fug-headed antiques locking horns with omniscient youth.

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.

Never underestimate the power of human ingratitude.

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.

There are several huge monasteries—of which Khang Phi is the greatest—dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. The monks do not sort it into good and evil knowledge, nor do they make moral judgments. They take the position that no knowledge is evil until someone chooses to do evil with it.