Glen Cook

Time is the most wicked of all villains.

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

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.

“I’ve been on my own before, Mather.” And I hadn’t been happy a moment. But happiness is a fleeting creature. It’s no birthright. Not anything I expect but something I accept when I tumble into it. Meantime, power will do nicely.

I have seen it before. Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

That was not supposed to happen. It was unthinkable, supposedly. And for ordinary people that was mostly true. But not so at a level where men began to believe that they existed outside the usual rules.

Raven muttered, “You don’t have to be brilliant to be a god.”

No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshipers’ description. I don’t see how they could survive their own insanity. But it’s not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.

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

I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely.

That your solution to everything? Cut somebody's throat?"
"Always slows them down.

Man, woman and child, the people of Shadowcatch were privy to the one true secret of the universe: there is always a darker shadow lurking beyond the one whose face you can see.

Something he had heard some wise man say. About the three stages of empire, the three generations. First came the conquerors, unstoppable in war. Then came the administrators, who bound it all together into one apparently unshakable, immortal edifice. Then came the wasters, who knew no responsibility and squandered the capital of their inheritance upon whims and vices. And fell to other conquerors.

I’ve always known people for whom a goal was everything, who never thought nothing about the consequences of the goal achieved.

Desperate people will do what they must to survive. Only a fool would expect the results to be pretty.