The Liar's Key

Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.

Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Sometimes my lies impressed the hell out of me.

Throw away too much of your past and you abandon the person who walked those days. When you pare away at yourself you can reinvent, that’s true enough, but such whittling always seems to reveal a lesser man, and promises to leave you with nothing at the end.

Sixty beats of a heart would be enough. If I could hold them. Let them know I came for them no matter what stood in my way. It would be enough. Sixty beats of a heart past that door would outweigh sixty years in this world without them.

The night can last twenty hours and even when the day finally breaks it never gets above a level of cold I call “fuck that”—as in you open the door, your face freezes instantly to the point where it hurts to speak, but manfully you manage to say “fuck that,” before turning round, and going back to bed.

I hit her. I’m not one for hitting women . . . or anyone else for that matter. In fact I’m not one for hitting anything liable to hit back, but given the choice between a hefty man and a slightly built woman I’ll punch out the woman every time.

Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s common sense compressed into its purest form.

A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand about licentious behaviour, it’s when I’m not involved.

A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination.

A great comfort, Tuttugu. I always like to do my drowning within sight of land.

The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.

Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.

I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.

There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again—everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.

it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day.

Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.

You look different,” Snorri said. “I think ‘even more handsome’ was the phrase you were looking for.

Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters.

Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke?

These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They’d hunt me to the ends of the earth!

I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it.

The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that’s too heavy to carry. •

What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.

There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.

The best liars always tell the truth—they just choose which parts.

Men are many and take strength as a challenge, difference as a crime.

Magic always struck me as hard and dangerous work...not that there are any words you can put before "work" that makes it sound attractive. Certainly not "dangerous" or "hard.