Glen Cook Quotes

And there went some good old-fashioned wishful thinking, Sleepy. We were talking about human beings. If there is any way to be contrary, unreasonable and obnoxious, human beings are sure to find and pursue it. With verve and enthusiasm at whatever might be the most inconvenient time.

Beneath my breath I continued my conversation with God. As usual, He did not trouble Himself to defend His Works to me. My fault for being a woman.

You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind.

I sped a prayer heavenward. God needs to be reminded.

“We’re still the Black Company. We still don’t leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coinage itself says bad money will drive out good. The same is true of principles, ethics and rules of conduct. If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possible remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.

Soldiers live. And wonder why.

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

You might have noticed that the human animal is fond of forming and clinging to prejudices, remaining their steadfast curator in the face of all reason and contradiction.

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

Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water.

Not dangerous at all. Not even that lucky. But a sufficiently paranoid mind will discern patterns and threats where only fortune has conspired.

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.

I don't get the Kina story. If she died back at the beginning of the world, how could she be giving us trouble for the last twenty or thirty years?"
"It's religion, dimwit," Goblin barked. "It don't got to make sense.

The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess.
When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing.

I picked up my five cards from the next deal. “This ain’t a hand, it’s a foot.”