King of Thorns

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment? And then turn out to really not have one?- Sir Makin to King Jorg

A Dark time comes. My time. If it offends you. Stop Me.

I've always seen 'no' as a challenge rather than an answer.

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

I’d be happier on a horse,” Makin said. “I’d be happier on a giant mountain goat,” I said. “One that shat diamonds. Until we find some, we’re walking.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

The Prince of Arrow has a much bigger army than you," Miana said. No "Your Highness" no "My Lord." "Yes, he does." I kept waving to the crowd, the big smile on my face. "He's going to win, isn't he?" she said. She looked twelve but she didn't sound twelve. "How old are you?" I asked, a quick glance down at her, still waving. "Twelve." Damn.

A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.

Makin once told me that a man who's got no fear is missing a friend.

Sometime, it's easier to love someone with flaws you can forgive in return for them forgiving yours.

So what was that about?" Makin asked, striding up behind. "They shot my idiot," I said.

Some men name their swords. I've always found that a strange affection. If I had to call it something I would all it "Sharp

I watched her backside as she went. I thought perhaps I wouldn't die if I could still find time to watch a well-crafted bottom

Three months previously I had entered the Haunt alone, covered in blood that was not my own and swinging a stolen sword. By Brothers followed me in. Now I left the castle in the hands of another. I had wanted my uncle's blood. His crown I took because other men said I could not have it.

You're going now?" Makin asked, putting down his bottle-in-a-basket. "Well, unless you want to drink till we're all sunburnt and maudlin and then declare undying love for each other and part with drunken hugs?" I said.

This is a bad idea." "If you ever stop saying that, I'll know it's time to start worrying.

Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.

If the sins of the flesh ever got old I didn't ever want enough years on me to know it.

In battle though his hands grow clever, and you'd think him whole, until the din fades, the dying fall, and Maical wanders the fields weeping.

Orrin of Arrow might have given them bread. He might have resolved to change this place. I just walk through it. Later I will scrape it from my shoes.

In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives—the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.

All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know.

All men will dig their heels in if pushed enough. All men will reach the point that they say "no" for no reason other than opposition, for no reason other than the word fits their mouth, and tastes as good as it sounds.

The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.