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War, my friends, is a thing of beauty. Those as says otherwise are losing.
Some people are born to rub you the wrong way. Brother Gemt was born to rub the world the wrong way.
You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.
Hate will keep you alive where love fails.
The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.
The marsh keeps her secrets, but not forever, and Jessop is where she tells them.”
You’d think priests would be better liars, what with their job and all.
Every brotherhood has a pecking order. With brothers like mine you don’t want to be at the bottom of that order. You’re liable to get pecked to death.
It galled me to have killed a man and have no memory of it, not even a trace of whatever rage drove me to it.
And we went out into the day, and all the heat of it couldn’t touch the ice in me.
“God is your witness, Renton, he’s going to watch you die.”
Out in the marshes I’d made a dead man run in terror, with nothing more than what I keep inside. It occurred to me that what scared the dead might worry the living a piece too.
hammers and a lot of nails.” I sipped my beer. “A strange thing—nails will hold a building together, but there’s nothing better for taking a man apart.”
“Father Gomst will pray for your soul,” I said. “And forgive me the sins I incur in detaching it from your body.”
“Churchmen, eh? Love one minute, forgiveness the next, and then it’s eternity on fire.
For the longest time I looked for a message in it all, to work out what I was supposed to be doing.
There’s a pattern in fire, as if something’s written there, and there’s folk who say they can read it too. Not me, though. It would have been nice to find some answers in the flames.
