Red Country

Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

Severed heads never go out of fashion. Used sparingly and with artistic sensibility, they can make a point a great deal more eloquently than those still attached.

People have often accused me of inconsistency but i feel that i have always, at any given junction, done the same thing. Exactly what i pleased.

That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit that prosper.

Justice can have what's left when I'm done.

A whore with a veil is mysterious. God's ways appear to be...insane.

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain't long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.

The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are.

She poured out a measure but Temple declined. 'Drink and I have had some long and painful conversations and found we simply can't agree.' 'Drink and I can't agree either.' She shrugged and tossed it down herself. 'But we keep on having the argument.

Unsheathe your swords!' He considered that. 'Or cheaper weapons! Let us ... do some good!

I hope this is a lesson to you. Never take eggs from a metal-eyed man.

What are you going to do?’ whispered Temple. ‘There was a time I’d have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.’ Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. ‘But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.’ ‘So what are you going to do?’ ‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘Then get bloody.

Lorsen shook his head in amazement. 'You truly are disgusting.' 'I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That's why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.

One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.

If you wanted to see my cock that badly, you could just have asked.' 'No doubt a thing o' haunting beauty but i came for something else.

Cosca smiled up at the dragon, hands on hips. ‘It certainly is a remarkable curiosity. A magnificent relic. But against what is already boiling across the plains? The legion of the dumb? The merchants and farmers and makers of trifles and filers of papers? The infinite tide of greedy little people?’ He waved his hat towards the dragon. ‘Such things as this are worthless as a cow against a swarm of ants. There will be no place in the world to come for the magical, the mysterious, the strange. They will come to your sacred places and build . . . tailors’ shops. And dry-goods emporia. And lawyers’ offices. They will make of them bland copies of everywhere else.’ The old mercenary scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. ‘You can wish it were not so. I wish it were not so. But it is so. I tire of lost causes. The time of men like me is passing. The time of men like you?’ He wiped a little blood from under his fingernails. ‘So long passed it might as well have never been.

Summers past love company, seems every time you turn around there's more o' the bastards at your back.

Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. "There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish." Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. "Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.

If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.

-'Would it help if I said I was very drunk?' Brachio shook his head. - 'We all were' -'Shitty childhood?' -'Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard.' -'Shitty adulthood?' -'Whose isn't?

Better to have steel to hand and find no trouble than find yourself in trouble with no steel to hand.

severed heads,' Cosca was explaining, 'never go out of fashion. Used sparingly and with artistic, sensibility,They can make a point a great deal more eloquently then those still attached.

The Inquisitor waited for silence. "Do you believe in anything?" "Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

There was a time he’d heard tales of Dab Sweet and he’d stuck thumbs in his belt and chin to the sky and tricked himself that was how his life had been. But the years scraped by hard as ever and he got less and the stories more ’til they were tales of a man he’d never met succeeding at what he’d never have dreamed of attempting.

Conscience and the cock-rot are hardly equivalent,’ snapped Lorsen. ‘Indeed,’ said Cosca, significantly. ‘The cock-rot is rarely fatal.

Way I see it, we've got two choices. Try and use these bastards, or kill 'em all. Hard words have never won a battle yet, but they've lost a few. You mean to kill a man, telling him so don't help.