Glen Cook > Quotes

“Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.”
― Glen Cook, Shadow Games

“There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.”
― Glen Cook

“. . .and the thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.”
― Glen Cook

“Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.”
― Glen Cook, Soldiers Live

“I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.”
― Glen Cook, Shadows Linger

“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.”
― Glen Cook, Shadows Linger

“I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.”
― Glen Cook, Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

“If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right.......all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance.”
― Glen Cook, The Black Company

“Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.”
― Glen Cook, The Black Company

“Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.”
― Glen Cook, Sweet Silver Blues

“Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.”
― Glen Cook

“I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.”
― Glen Cook, Shadow Games

“More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.”
― Glen Cook, Dreams of Steel

“No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.”
― Glen Cook, The White Rose

“I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.”
― Glen Cook

“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”
― Glen Cook, Water Sleeps

“The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.”
― Glen Cook, Dreams of Steel

“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 family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.”
― Glen Cook, Shadows Linger

“The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.”
― Glen Cook, Water Sleeps

“It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.
Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.
As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.”
― Glen Cook, The Tyranny of the Night