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I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.
Bravery may be observed when a person tramples one fear whilst in secret flight from a greater terror. And those whose greatest terror is being thought a coward are always brave.
The silent ones are apt to kill you. The more sound and fury there is, the less murderous the animal. True of men too.
Grandmother’s words came so thick with disappointment that you felt it reach out and try to throttle you.
It’s good to steer a man in the direction he intended to go. It blurs the line between what he wants and what you want.
“To err is human, to forgive is divine . . . but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.”
Enjoy the world while you can, I say. A shallow enough philosophy by which to live, but shallow is what I’ve got. Besides, deep is apt to drown you.
“Most of what a man is has been written by the time his beard starts to prickle. A babe is made of maybes. There are few crimes worse than the ending of something before its time.”
We all practise self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns.
It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.
“I try to be a fair man, to live with honour, but come against me armed and looking to take my life, and you will not walk away again.”
if a man can unnerve you across a crowded room just by cutting his beef, then you probably don’t want to see him draw steel.
Life has ways of getting under your skin, spoiling your fun with too much information. Youth is truly the happiest time where we roll in the bliss of ignorance.
Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.
“Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.”
“Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.”
“A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.”
Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”
“Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.”
The only thing that stops me from running away in battle is knowing everyone else is faster than me and I’d get cut down from behind. The best chance lies in facing the enemy head-on. If the gods had given me longer legs . . . well, I’d be gone.”
