“Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right.......all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Ah, the smell of mystery and dark doings, of skulduggery and revenge. The meat of a good tale.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“The price of order,” I muttered. I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn’t budge.
“The cost of chaos,” Tom-Tom countered. Thump on his drum. “Not quite the same thing, Croaker.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“A herd of minuscule lightning bugs poured out of One-Eye's nostrils. Good soldiers all, they fell into formation, spelling out the words Goblin is a Poof.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Back to the company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to the annals. Back to fear.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Closer at hand, the wheeling gulls were as surly and lackadaisical as the day promised to make most men.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“The Hanged Man stopped gesturing and struck a pose: man listening.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight. Lightning”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“Okay, Croaker. What the hell happened?”
“I don't know. The falling sickness?”
“Give him some of his own soup,” somebody suggested. “Serve him right.” A tin cup appeared. We forced its contents down his throat.
His eye clicked open. “What are you trying to do? Poison me? Feh! What was that? Boiled sewage?”
“Your soup,” I told him.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Black Company
“The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man's being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible's position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that person's dignity.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
“It was one of the primary rules of thievery. When hiding, sneaking, and trickery are all out, the correct answer is "run like hell.”
― quote from Thief's Covenant
“I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition.”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man
“There’s a brown leather section, a green leather section, a red leather section and a tan leather section. Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, all in a row. And everywhere you look there are fireplaces. There’s one in every bedroom, there’s one in the living room, another in the dining room and still another in the library. There aren’t any in the bathrooms or the kitchen. My mother and father call the”
― Judy Blume, quote from Superfudge
“Quentin found it hard not to blame her doctors, and especially her father, for not being open-minded enough to at least consider the possibility that there had been nothing wrong with Diana from the beginning. But they hadn't. Faced with the inexplicable, with experiences and behaviors they didn't understand and were frightened by, they had acted swiftly, with all the supposed knowledge of modern-day medicine, to "fix" her "problems."
Even before she hit puberty, for Christ's sake.
And they had left her only half alive. A pale, colorless, vague, and passionless copy of the Diana she was meant to be.
Christ, no wonder she looked out on the world with wary, suspicious eyes. Finally off all the mind-numbing medications, Diana was clearheaded for the first time since childhood. Truly aware for the first time of the world around her. And not just aware, but painfully alert, with the raw-nerved sensitivity of most psychics.
She knew, now. No matter what she was willing to admit aloud or even consciously, she knew now that she had been kept half alive, less than that. Knew that those she had trusted most had betrayed that trust, even if they had done it in the name of love and concern and with all good intentions. They hadn't kept her safe, they had kept her doped up and compliant. They had sought to hammer away all the sharp, unique edges that made her Diana.
So she could be healthy. Like everybody else.
It had been in her voice when she'd told him, a haunted awareness of all she'd lost.
"I'm thirty-three now. You do the math."
He thought it must have been like waking from a coma or a hazy dream to find that everything that had gone before had not been real. The world had turned, time had moved on... and Diana had lost years.
Years.”
― Kay Hooper, quote from Chill of Fear
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