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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.
Cody Albaugh liked this
Savour the little moments, son, that’s my advice. They’re what life is. All the things that happen while you’re waiting for something else.
Cody Albaugh liked this
But he’d long ago learned that most men love nothing better than to be listened to. Especially powerful men.
When you’re planning what to do, always think of doing nothing first, see where that gets you.
Some men will smash a thing just because they can. They’re too stupid to see that nothing shows more power than mercy.”
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.”
There is a gulf of difference, after all, between expecting the worst and seeing it happen.
Seemed a shitty way to go back to the mud, but maybe they all are.
If you can’t make your enemies trust you, you can at least make them mistrust each other.
There was a right way of doing things, far as Craw was concerned, and it didn’t include letting men laugh at your friends behind their backs, however laughable they may be.
it seems to me a man can do an awful lot of evil in no time at all. Swing of a blade is all it takes. Doing good needs time. And all manner of complicated efforts. Most men don’t have the patience for it.
There’s no curse like getting what you want.”
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.
For him there was a chasm between mind and mouth he could not see how to bridge. Did not dare to bridge.
His father used to tell him it’s easy to see the enemy one of two ways. As some implacable, terrifying, unstoppable force that can only be feared and never understood. Or some block of wood that doesn’t think, doesn’t move, a dumb target to shoot your plans at. But the enemy is neither one. Imagine he’s you, that he’s no more and no less of a fool, or a coward, or a hero than you are. If you can imagine that, you won’t go too far wrong. The enemy is just a set of men. That’s the realisation that makes war easy. And the one that makes it hard.
He was trying to be their leader, not their lover, and a leader’s best feared first, and liked afterward.
“The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”
“There’s no shame in being scared. Bravery is being scared, and doing it anyway.”
Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Obvious, perhaps. Something that everyone knows. Something that everyone knows, but no one truly believes. 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. He poked at the boy’s corpse with a toe, rolled it onto its side, then let it flop back. 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.
“What kind of right ends up with more men dead than less?”
As if he had been informed of the loss of a dear friend rather than a bitter enemy. Truly, the two can sometimes be hard to separate.
