The Lady made a few gestures around Bomanz—who looked pretty moth-eaten—and said a few words in a language I did not understand. Why do sorcerers always use languages nobody understands? Even Goblin a...
That is something I like to look at with any villain. What twists and knots went into the thread tying the creature at Charm to the little girl who was? Consider little children. There are not many of...
Singed, he said, assuming that air of phony dignity cats adopt after some particularly inept performance. Something like, That’s what I meant to do all along.
Pull up a step, Ace, I told him. He did, but he had the fidgets. He kept looking for his lucky exit. I told him, I didn’t really want you. But I can’t get ahold of Winger. Not that I’d tried. What? Wh...
One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight. Lightning
One-Eye scowled at Goblin. Keep it up, Barf Bag. You’ll be grocery shopping with the turtles. What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us....
Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.
Maybe. We're all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!
Lucky me, I’d ended up just getting another lesson revealing the basic blackness lying below the human heart. Once again I’d seen that, given incentive and opportunity, most anybody will jump at the c...
In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.
If brains were glazier’s putty, he couldn’t weatherproof a windowless room.
I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no fam...
I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive.
He surveyed his audience with that look of sublime solemnity only a drunk can muster.
Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.
Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.
An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. I am a soldier. I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy’s own Dejagoran dialect. I’v...
While something would be happening inside. I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific elsewhere in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my te...
Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which the...