Glen Cook

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

It is a chance to flit off and double-check my memory, which I have found to be astonishingly unreliable.
Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking we have invested.

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

Do you think we could get a tutor for Varth?”

I reminded myself that Khang Phi is bereft of arms. That the monks abhor violence. That they always yield to strength, then seduce it with reason and wisdom.
Yes, sometimes it does take a while.

The road can blunt the most iron will.

“When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.”
Santaraksita smiled sourly, “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.”
He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
And that is a truth upon which you can rely.

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.”

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

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.”

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

“Truth is a deadly weapon,” Lady said.
“Which is why priests and princes dread it,” I said.

She was not listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths.

Nobody knew what the Company wanted. Various witnesses assigned motives according to their own fears. Few came anywhere near the mark.

Peace had broken out and was being enthusiastically exploited on the presumption that it could not possibly last.