“Doing better next time. That’s what life is.”
“A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.”
“But some things have to be done. It’s better to do them, than to live with the fear of them.”
“lies. The hardest kind to see through. The kind you tell yourself.”
“Come,” he whispered. They all were welcome.
They scattered for the racks, seizing their spiked swords, and their sharp axes, and the Bloody-Nine laughed to watch them. Armed or not, their death was a thing already decided. It was written into the cavern in lines of fire and lines of shadow. Now he would write it in lines of blood. “Die!” he roared, and the blade made circles, savage and beautiful, the letter on the metal burning red and leaving bright trails behind. And where the circles passed everything would be made right. The Shanka would scream and gibber, and the pieces of them would scatter, and they would be sliced and divided as neatly as meat on the butcher’s block
The Bloody-Nine showed his teeth, and smiled to be free, and to see the good work done so well. He knocked a barbed sword from a Flathead’s hand, seized it by the scruff of the neck and forced its face down into the channel where the molten steel flowed, furious yellow, and its head hissed and bubbled, shooting out stinking steam.
“Burn!” laughed the Bloody-Nine, and the ruined corpses, and their gaping wounds, and their fallen weapons, and the boiling bright iron laughed with him.
Only the Shanka did not laugh. They knew their hour was come.”
“More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.”
“Sand dan Glokta, shield to the helpless. Is it ever too late to be . . . a good man?”
“The blade itself incites to deeds of violence’ Homer”
“There are few ills a good cup of tea won’t help with.”
“He had discovered early in his military career that if one has an effective and experienced officer above, coupled with effective and experienced soldiers below, one need do, and know, nothing.”
“Nothing to it. You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong.”
“The best lessons one teaches oneself.”
“Perhaps we’ll have some answers, at least, before the end. I always dreamed of dying well-informed.”
“You don’t pick your family, you take what you’re given and you make the best of it.”
“She tipped back her head and swilled down the last of her wine. ‘Having fucked the groom is really no excuse for missing a wedding, you know.”
“Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. Selfishness belongs to children, and to halfwits. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a king, one need only treat everyone else like one.”
“Transformations
All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.”
“After killing the dancer, he dismembered her body, boiled her head in a kitchen pot, and placed bits of her flesh in buckets he then kept in storage facilities. Having cooked her flesh, he then, in an act of grotesque generosity, dispensed some to the homeless in his neighborhood as "meat.”
“Tja, angefangen hat das alles, als ich eines Tages darauf gekommen bin, dass der Hausmeister meiner Highschool der Würgengel war …”
“Actually, I came because I have a last-minute invitation. My friend Erika Gill is having a big party tomorrow night, one of those all-out birthday bashes that girls like. Want to go?"
----------------------------------------
"No. Sorry."
"Since it's a catered thing, at a restaurant, I'll pick you up at- what did you say?"
"I'm sorry. I can't do it."
----------------------------------------
"You're busy?"
"I just can't do it," I said.”
“And if I use the opportunity to kill you and leave?” the giant said in a tone half-serious half-arch.
“I have never known warriors to be dishonourable. Should you prove me wrong, we will all be dead anyway. There is nothing so ugly as reneging a promise, wouldn’t you agree?”
The giant clenched his teeth and looked down. “I would,” he murmured.”
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