Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead

What gets people going is stuff that doesn’t mean shit but sounds great. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. I have a dream. Drain the swamp. Yes, we can. It’s the sound of the words and the cadences.

But during that time, all the wise scholars and profound thinkers who ran the place fell to brooding on the nature of human society, and came to the conclusion that, left to itself, it didn’t work terribly well. And why? Because, they argued, plausibly enough, it tends to be run by idiots; kings (ruled by their own base desires and hopelessly interbred) or dictators (anyone who seizes power by that very act disqualifies himself from being trusted with it) or oligarchies (irredeemably self-serving and corrupt) or, God help us, democracies (in the republic of the stupid, the half-witted man is prime minister) – there had to be a better way, and to the wisest men in the known world, it was painfully obvious what it was. If a job needs doing, do it ourselves.

And if you do a good thing for a shitty reason, you’re still a shit. The good is just a by-product, the excrement of evil.

Lying is like farming, or draining marshland, or terracing a hillside or planting a grove of peach trees. It’s an attempt to control your environment and make it better. A convincing lie improves on bleak, bare fact, in the same way human beings improve a wilderness so they can bear to live there. In comparison, truth is a desert. You need to plant it with your imagination and water it with narrative skill until it blossoms and bears nourishing fruit. In the sand and gravel of what actually happened I grow truths of my own; not just different truths, better ones. Practically every time I open my mouth I improve the world, making it not how it is but how it should be.

A curious fact. I can’t remember ever getting myself in serious trouble through doing something bad. All the really catastrophic shit I’ve trodden in over the course of an eventful life has come from trying to do the right thing.

When everything tastes of fear and dread, even the nice things, it’s hard to be enthusiastic about anything.

inevitable feisty kickass female lead with attitude who’s so difficult to make credible, for some reason.

Where you always go wrong is trying to persuade people with facts and arguments. It's why you can only write comedy. What gets people going is stuff that doesn't mean shit but sounds great. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. I have a dream. Drain the swamp. Yes, we can. It's the sound of the words and the cadences. You never managed to get that right.

The men of Sirupat weren't fighters because they didn't want to be, and in my book there's no higher praise than that--and that's the main reason, when you come to think of it, why women are so infinitely superior to men. But for God's sake don't tell them I said so.

For instance, I could have written this book in such a way that you’d like me and approve of all my choices, simply by twisting a few facts here and there and making people say things they didn’t, and you’d never know the difference.

Four hundred and sixty-something years ago, one of my illustrious ancestors came to Scona and dedicated an icon, painted by the immortal Theudibert before he was famous, in the nave of the Needle Eye. My ancestor wanted God to bless his plan to invade an island off the Olbian coast, loot the moveable property, enslave the population and set up a plantation growing citrus fruits for the City trade; and God, much to everyone’s surprise, duly smiled on the venture and our family got seriously rich.

So there was nothing for me to do except pass the time, and there’s an interesting thing, if such things interest you. Time: timing; the nature of the process by which a unit of future becomes a unit of past through the agency of the present. If there’s anything in this story of mine apart from a few rather sloppy adventures in which nobody can be said to have distinguished themselves particularly, it’s a study in the operation of time.

Where he’d gone wrong, I reflected, as the same soldiers marched me back, was not putting enough truth into his mix. He’d told me it wasn’t my fault, that I was a victim of circumstances. We truly believe we have to do dreadful things, because we have no choice; that was where he’d lost me, because there’s always a choice.