The essence of sorcery, even for its nonfraudulent practitioners, is misdirection. - Glen Cook

We are not really a godless bunch. We are just the sort who ignore the gods—probably in the unconscious hope that the gods will not notice us.

He hadn’t been religious. He’d believed that death was it. When you died you were dead, like a squished bug or drowned rat, and your immortality was in the minds of those you left behind.

Public works which did not serve the rich and powerful had a way of dying of neglect.