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Strange thing, that–the fewer years you have to lose the more you fear the losing of ’em. Maybe a man just gets a stock of courage when he’s born, and wears it down with each scrape he gets into.
He’d thought it through, and this was the right thing to do. Or the least wrong thing, anyway. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.
You are the most beautiful woman in the world–no–in all of history–no–the most beautiful thing in all of history. Kill me, now, so that your face can be the last thing I see.
“Didn’t really know what I wanted back then, just thought I didn’t have it, and I could get it with a sword.”
The replacements they were getting lately were an insult to the bottom of the barrel.
“First thing a fighter has to learn is when not to fight.
I was proud to take you when you had the world at your feet. What kind of a man would I be if I turned my back now you’ve got the world on your shoulders?
Calder left the fire with worry weighing on his shoulders like a coat of double mail. When the best you can get from your wife’s father is that he won’t help to kill you, it doesn’t take a clever man to see you’re in shit to your chin.
They didn’t care a shit. People don’t, on the whole. They didn’t know who he was, and even if they had he was widely hated, and even if he’d been widely loved, still, on the whole, no one cares a shit.
When you’re planning what to do, always think of doing nothing first, see where that gets you.
“Before you make a man into mud,” his father had told him afterwards in his disappointed voice, “make sure he’s no use to you alive. Some men will smash a thing just because they can. They’re too stupid to see that nothing shows more power than mercy.”
When men break they break all at once, like a wall falling, like a cliff splitting off into the sea. Broken.
A good leader can’t dwell on the choices he’s made, Threetrees used to tell him, and a good leader can’t help dwelling on ’em.
He’d done the right thing. Maybe. Or maybe there’s no such thing.
A good arse only goes so far. Something most men never realise.
What is love anyway, but finding someone who suits you? Someone who makes up for your shortcomings? Someone you can work with. Work on.
Perhaps that was the moment you grew up, when you learned your parents were just as fallible as everyone else.
It is easy to forget how much you have, when your eyes are always fixed on what you have not.
There aren’t many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in a war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they’ll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There’s no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.”
Seemed as if the more dangerous things got the more clothes he liked to lose.
There is a gulf of difference, after all, between expecting the worst and seeing it happen.
Lasmark drew his sword. He’d picked it up cheap, an antique, really, the hilt was prone to rattle. He’d paid less for it than he had for his dress hat. That seemed a foolish decision now. But then one sword looked much like another and Major Popol had been very particular about the appearance of his officers on parade. They were not on parade now, more the pity.
If victory makes men brave, defeat renders them cowards.
Defeat, it seems, brings out the best in some men.
“My motives were not selfless.” “Whose are? It’s the results that go down in history. Our reasons are written in smoke.
“If a mason builds a wall upon a slope and it collapses, he can hardly complain that it would have stood a thousand years if only he had been given level ground to work with.”
“In war, the ground is never level.”
Take victory quiet and careful, Rudd Threetrees used to say, ’cause you might soon be called on to take defeat the same way.
If you can’t make your enemies trust you, you can at least make them mistrust each other. Patience, his father would have told him, patience.
I can tell you power is a bloody mirage. The closer you seem to get the further away it is. So many demands to balance. So many pressures to endure. All the consequences of every decision weighing on you… small wonder the king never makes any.
“You can’t say that civilisation don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way”
She wanted to tell him he was a good man, but the world was not the way good people thought it was.
his desire to look manly greatly outweighed by his desire to stay alive.
Officers dashed to nowhere, pointed everywhere, screeched contradictory orders at each other, the room growing steadily darker and more confused as the windows were barricaded with whatever gaudy junk was to hand.
An army is made of details the way a house is made of bricks. One brick carelessly laid and the whole is compromised.
His cousin had warned him not to enlist. Had told him wars were upside-down places where good men did worse than bad.
Had told him wars were all about rich men’s ambitions and poor men’s graves, and there hadn’t been two honest fellows to strike a spark of decency in the whole company he served with. That officers were all arrogance, ignorance and incompetence. That soldiers were all cowards, braggarts, bullies or thieves.
“Oftentimes,” murmured Whirrun, “a man’s better served embracing his pain than trying to escape it. Things are smaller when you face ’em.”
Doing good needs time. And all manner of complicated efforts. Most men don’t have the patience for it. ’Specially not these days.”
“He plays up to it. You know how it is, having a reputation.” “Fame’s a prison, no doubt.
Always do the right thing sounds an easy rule to stick to. But when’s the right thing the wrong thing? That’s the question.
“You want to kill a man, by the dead, you do it while he’s facing the other way.”
“Patience is as fearsome a weapon as rage. More so, in fact, ’cause fewer men have it.”
Some men are made for doing violence. Some are meant for planning it. Then there are a special few whose talent is for taking the credit.
He was trying to be their leader, not their lover, and a leader’s best feared first, and liked afterward.
But his voice rang out gruff and deep still. Thank the dead for his hero’s voice, even if time had given him a coward’s guts.
They think when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.
Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.
Sometimes a thing can seem an impossible leap, then when you do it you find it’s just been a little step all along.
“Life is, basically, fucking shit.” “Best to keep your expectations low. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
