Glen Cook Quotes

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.

It looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down.

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.”

An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people.

The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance.

No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don’t believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness.

Hatreds seldom are constrained to rational scales.

“Used to be” is not worth the breeze on which it is scribbled.

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.

“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.

Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable.

I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much.

Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out.