Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.' Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. 'In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.''Pride is all I have.

No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.

Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.

Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.

I've never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy.

People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it's too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It's not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.

Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.

There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in us, deeper than our blood.

There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in is, deeper than our blood.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

Men who are certain of everything - well perhaps they are not men at all.

And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.

When you become a father, it changes you." Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. "You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with.

Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man.

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

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.

I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood.

Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying— lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies— which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!

It doesn't pay to trust a lettered man in the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other man's ideas.

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them.

To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.

It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.

Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.

There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.

You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won't slow you down.

When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.

I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that'd make you want to hurl.

I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them.

I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made.

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.

Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.

I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.

Truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield.

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.

Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.

After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.

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

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

The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning.

When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.

The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.

Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us. The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave, as only those who’ve already lost can be.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

I've been known to be contrary. When something pushes me, I shove back. Even if the one doing the pushing is me. It would have been easy to gut him then and there. Satisfying. But the need was too urgent. I felt pushed.

Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.

All the best secrets are told at night.

At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins.

For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.

Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.

Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.

The enemy of my enemy may be my friend … of course the friend of my friend is often a jerk.

Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name— Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.

Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.

It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from.

...and an edge that could cut a truth from a lie.

Gomst's mouth framed a 'no', but every other muscle in him said 'yes'. You'd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all.

You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them.

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.

Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go.

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.

Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!

A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.