Quotes from Promise of Blood

“Doctor, what could you prescribe for Charlemund?”
The doctor looked down his nose at the unconscious form of the arch-diocel.
“Arsenic?”
“Now, really. Something to give him a quality headache and a great deal of memory loss.”
“Cyanide.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“You’ve one mark on your record,” Tamas said. “You once punched a na-baron in the face. Broke his jaw. Tell me about that.”
Olem grimaced. “Officially, sir, I was pushing him out of the way of a runaway carriage. Saved his life. Half my company saw it.”
“With your fist?”
“Aye.”
“And unofficially?”
“The man was a git. He shot my dog because it startled his horse.”
“And if I ever have cause to shoot your dog?”
“I’ll punch you in the face.”
“Fair enough. You have the job.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“The age of kings is dead, Adamat, and I have killed it.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“I’m an investigator, my dear. Other people’s business is my business.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“You seem to be in unusually good spirits.” “I do?” Tamas said. “I haven’t said two words.” Prime cleared his throat. “I can sense it about you. It’s in the air. Like a first-year student who knows he’s going to be every professor’s favorite. It’s annoying.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“Don’t trust any man who surrounds himself with beautiful women. Least of all a priest.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“When a man solved his problems by punching them, books were often a foreign thing.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“For Dad For never being hesitant that I’d make it this far. Even when you should have been.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“You know,” Taniel said, “we could have kept firing after they sounded the retreat. Would have wiped out thousands on the mountainside. The Kez did that to us in Fatrasta a few times.”
Gavril snorted angrily. “War has to have some decorum. Otherwise it’s back to the Bleakening for all of us, and Kresimir be damned.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“The people are hungry,” Mihali said. He lifted his hands, spreading them to encompass the city. “The people need to be fed. They need bread and wine and soup and meat. But not just that. They need friendship.” He pointed to a minor noble, some viscount decked out in his finest foppish frills, who poured a bottle of St. Adom’s Festival wine into the cups of a half-dozen street urchins.
“They need companionship,” Mihali said. “They need love and brotherhood.” He turned to Tamas. He reached out with one hand, putting a palm to Tamas’s cheek. Instinct told Tamas to step back. He found that he couldn’t.
“You gorged them on the blood of the nobility,” Mihali said gently. “They drank, but were not filled. They ate of hatred and grew hungrier.” He took a deep breath. “Your intentions were… well, not pure, but just. Justice is never enough.” He let go of Tamas and turned to the square. “I will put things right,” he said. He puffed out his chest and spread his arms. “I will feed all of Adro. It is what they need.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“I believed it had been long enough that Kresimir would never return. I believed it was time for change. I thought all of Rozalia’s concerns were foolish, and that Julene was living in the past. I believed we were alone.”
“My people have never been alone,” Mihali said. “The others may have left. I did not.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“A king’s pride doesn’t fill the people’s bellies.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“The world is changing. People do not exist to serve their governments or their kings. Governments exist to serve the people, so the people should have a say in those governments.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“If they can kill,” Gavril said, “they can drink.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“The lockpick gaped up at Adamat from his knees. “You’re making enough noise, you might as well have knocked on the front door,” Adamat said.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“The problem with logic,” Prime said, “is that sometimes you are forced to believe your own hypothesis, even if you don’t want”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“He was a longtime street thug who had just enough ruthlessness to rise to legitimate businesses and not quite enough intelligence to leave his dark life behind him. Aptly suited as a banker.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“Tamas had heard that every genius was equal parts madness. He”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“There were a number of powerful factions within Adro: the Wings of Adom mercenaries, the royal cabal, the Mountainwatch, and the great noble families.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“You gorged them on the blood of the nobility,” Mihali said gently. “They drank, but were not filled. They ate of hatred and grew hungrier.” He”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“My loyalties are not for sale,” Adamat said. “You’ll have to change your loyalties, then.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“Yes. I’d already realized that.” Adamat gritted his teeth. “You’re the type of man who gives face to evil.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

“Books are important. They link us to the past, to the future. Every written word gives us another hint about how to control the Else.”
― Brian McClellan, quote from Promise of Blood

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Popular quotes

“It was funny that she should have said that, for Julian chose that moment to begin baaing like a flock of sheep. His one long, bleating "baa-baa-aa-aa" was taken up by the echoes at once, and it seemed suddenly as if hundreds of poor lost sheep were baa-ing their way down the dungeons! Mr. Stick jumped to his feet, as white as a sheet. "Well, if it isn't sheep now!" he said. "What's up? What's in these "ere dungeons? I never did like them." "Baa-aa-AAAAAAAAAAP went the mournful bleats all round and about. And then”
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“Loose an hour and you cannot catch up in a year.”
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“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
― Walter Brueggemann, quote from The Prophetic Imagination

“He would never know know her. Such intimacy but no communication, because words - even if she could speak or write them - could never explain her world to him.”
― Mary Balogh, quote from Silent Melody

“I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked.”
― François Mauriac, quote from Viper's Tangle

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