More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Her Holiness the Pope.
Feminism
What one was called upon to repent of wasn’t specified. Everyone’s got something, don’t they?
had he mentioned the prostitutes?
Okay maybe not feminism
Theology had never really been his strong suit, but he was reasonably sure the Saviour had talked a lot about mercy.
Swearing’s free, after all.
Start the evening looking for fun, end the morning begging forgiveness.
There really is nothing romantic about a punch in the gut from someone twice your size, specially when the best you’ve got to look forward to is another.
thought he might have done himself a mischief around the groin area.
“A time comes when the stakes are of such enormity that moral objections become themselves immoral.” “Do they? I mean—they do? That is—they do. Do they?”
“The Church must, of course, remain faithful to the teachings of our Saviour. But there are tasks that must be undertaken, and methods used, to which the faithful and unimpeachable … are not suited.”
She was an onion made of only skins with nothing at the centre.
shrek
He had an awkward smile, like he didn’t quite trust her, which showed good judgement as she was a treacherous rat, ask anyone.
“The Almighty tends against killing,” said Duke Michael, “if I remember my scripture.” “Far as I can tell he makes all manner of exceptions.” “God has that luxury, he’s unlikely to get knifed in a fish market.”
“If I’ve learned one thing in all my years of using one, it’s that men with swords die every bit as easily as other men, and usually much sooner.
New dukes can be made with a word, but good servants a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Bit careless. Losing a dukedom.”
This much luck had to have a razor hidden in it somewhere,
some new place to settle. You have to treat people like oranges, Gal the Purse always said. Squeeze what you can from the bastards, then waste no regrets when you toss away their wrung-out skins. You have to treat people like stepping stones. Like rungs on your ladder. Or you’ll wake up one day with nothing but a set of bootprints on your own back.
“You have a very great number of knives,” he murmured. “I’ve found it’s a bad idea to run out.”
hair and beard shot with grey. “But petty injustice, hypocrisy, and oppression are eternal.”
“If vampires made sound moral judgements, after all … why would the world need priests?”
Never give up the lie. Admit the truth, you’re fucked. Cling to the lie, you never know. Lie all the way to the scaffold, lie with the rope around your neck, let them bury your lying corpse still sticking to its story.
The truth is a luxury the likes of you can never afford.
For someone constantly thinking about running for it, it was amazing how she always missed her chance.
“A tower a high tower the highest tower and there burns a light a light to guide the faithful a false light a true light a light reflected.”
where is the punctuation
“All I did was stand there.” “That’s nine-tenths of what an Empress does.”
“That is the terrible inevitability we must all face. Against that implacable, insatiable, unholy enemy, Europe must stand together … or forever fall into darkness.”
She’d no doubt the elves were real bastards. Who wasn’t?
Schism and Church and blah, blah, blah.
Alex couldn’t have given a smaller shit about all that if she’d gone at a turd with tweezers,
Wouldn’t have been thieving at all in her book, just a noble effort at redistribution. But sadly, the dress they’d belted her into was cut more for sitting still and smiling than redistribution, and had tight sleeves.
Priests might not be allowed to fuck, but that only seemed to encourage some of them.
“She sought to enslave a splinter of God.”
the Almighty sides with the favourites, and once you’re hoping for angels to even the odds you’re proper fucked.
The choice at Balthazar’s farce of a trial had been atonement for his trespasses through service to Her Holiness or burning at the stake. At the time it had seemed a no-brainer, but he was beginning to suspect that, in the long run, immolation might prove to have been the less painful option.
He had never had much patience for religion. What was it, really, but superstition with money?
Balthazar was caught where he spent much of his time: somewhere between contempt and envy. He might know it was all flimflam, but to believe a lie was as comforting for the believer as to know the truth. For an instant he could not but wonder—is it truly better to be a woebegone cynic than an ecstatic dupe?
“Can God really bless such devils as we are, Cardinal?”
“You know, I have always found it a paradox: there is nothing more freeing than being bound to a common purpose.”
Panicking bakes no cakes,
But you reach a certain age, everything reminds you of something.
“What shall I do?” asked Sunny, falling in beside him. “Live through it.” Jakob grinned at her.
mute testament to the greatest fighting technique of all: a friend behind your enemy.
Jakob had yet to see a theologist solve a problem they hadn’t themselves created.
He was quite the kiss-arse, but that’s monks for you. Pay a man to grovel to God three times a day and he’ll soon be grovelling to everyone.
“A wound to the body pales beside a wound to the soul.”
The Saviour had said one could not buy one’s way into heaven, but most agreed that was just a negotiating tactic on her part.
Lying was a sin, apparently, unless you did it outrageously and persistently enough, in which case it qualified as scripture.
“At least you hate yourselves more than each other.” “The cornerstone of any friendship,”
