Fate was but one more world-born subterfuge, another lie men used to give meaning to their abject helplessness.
Everything we say to one another, we also say to souls absent. We continually speak to the speech that comes after our voice, forever prepare those who would listen. No truth spoken is true simply bec...
Dreams drawn from the sheath.
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
Darkness shields as much as it threatens.
Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
He knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.
You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less i...
Where power was perceived, power was given.
Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to th...
We make a sad couple, she said, as though making a casual observation. Why would you say that? A sorcerer and a harlot . . . There’s something sad about that. He grasped her hand and kissed the tips o...
Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowl...
To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you canno...
To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willin...
The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor.
Sorweel: „Then how can we hope to resist him?Harweel: „With our swords and our shields. And when those fail us, with spit and curses.But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first...
Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved...
Screens of tumbling water, breaking the world beyond them into glittering lines and smeared shadows. Kellhus had ceased trying to penetrate them.Power, Anasûrimbor Moënghus said, is always power over....