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Fairy tales—simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.
“It’s customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn’t die with no understanding of why he’s been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple.”
That’s the trouble with chainmail: it’s no defense against joints bending in ways they’re not designed to bend.
“Keep your eyes to yourself, if you want to keep them in your face.”
‘Anything that is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.’
‘I believe in justice, as long as I’m holding a knife at the throat of the judge.’
The best time to catch a man off guard is while he’s talking—too much of his attention is on what he’s going to say next.
“He that lives by the sword shall die by my knife,” I tell him. “That’s prophecy, if you like.”
“ ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ ”
“Y’know, there’s nothing more dangerous than an intellectual with power,” I say in a light and conversational tone, as though we were back arguing over a jug of wine at Garthan Hold. “He can rationalize any crime, and he’s certainly not going to let abstractions like justice, loyalty, or honor get in his way.”
*Our Workers are worse, really; with the zombies, you can’t see the buried spark of life—intelligence, will, whatever—that makes Workers so tragically creepy.*
“Like what? Justice? Give me a break. Honor? Those are abstractions we’ve invented, to make the reality of power easier to face, to con people into voluntarily limiting themselves.”
Sons are a man’s pride, Caine, and daughters are the comfort of his age.
“Subtlety is for the weak. It is a wheedling tactic they use to achieve their desires, when they lack the power to do so directly.”
Ceremony is for insignificant men who lick others’pretended awe like spittle from their chins.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
Which, in the end, is more important, the power itself, or the method used to acquire it?”
Opposites attract, but similarities bind.
Revulsion and horror are potent tools, but alone they are rarely sufficient. Perhaps the most powerful tool in the process of progressive degradation is the subject’s own imagination. It is this which we must always seek to stimulate.”
This is what I live for. This is why I am what I am. There is purity in violence, in the desperate struggle to pull life from death, that surpasses any philosopher’s sere quest for truth. All bets are off, now, all rules suspended: no more grey-scale wandering through the moral fog of real life—this is elemental, black and white, life and death. And even life, even death: they have little meaning for me now. They are only outcomes, consequences, vague peripheries. The violence itself consumes me, even in anticipation.
I can’t say exactly why I thought I could handle five armed and armored men— There is, y’know, a history of insanity in my family.
We both carry those images, those built-up mental constructs. I think we’ve spent so long talking to ourselves, inside our own heads, arguing with an imaginary Caine, a fictitious Pallas, that we’ve virtually forgotten the reality that hides behind them.
If all paths lead equally to death, what’s left to direct you at the crossroads except pure whim?
My father would say: freedom that can be taken away was never real in the first place, and maybe he’s right. Maybe that freedom was always only a figment of my imagination—but it was an illusion I cherished. Shattering an illusion is the insult we never forgive.
Okay, maybe I don’t have to solve every problem with my fists . . . but every once in a while, a situation arises that is substantially improved by the judicious application of force.
Like the saying goes, opportunity is a nettle—grasp it boldly, or get stung.”
“Does it matter? When you tell a story loud enough and long enough, a story that plays right into people’s worst fears of betrayal, it grows its own truth.”
A few days of calm and quiet lets sudden fears relax and outrageous rumors dissipate.
A simple shift in perspective, an epiphanic flash of a shared singleness of purpose, and the crowd was no longer a crowd, was no longer a mass of individuals who chanced to stand together on this street on this day. Each man, each woman, dwarf and elf, ogrillo and sprite, had all become single cells in some massive hive mind, almost a single organism—an organism that was hungry.
Sometimes, the toughest part of a revolution is deciding to start one.
Sometimes, we destroy simply because we can. Because, when you come right down to it, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else.
Caine was like some force of nature, some wind or storm that would suddenly appear and blast the land for miles about, then vanish again. No one knew where he came from, no one knew where he went: his only tracks were the indelible scars he left on the lives that he touched. And Caine was more than this, more than a mere elemental power—the elements, after all, Ma’elKoth had shown he could control to a nicety. Caine was like a griffin or a dragon, a supremely dangerous animal that could be befriended but never tamed. At any moment his thin veneer of humanity could burst to reveal howling
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There is nothing easier than happiness; it’s the feeling that comes when you’re open to the life that flows through you, when you know that you are the river and the river is you.
“One of the things I’ve learned in all these years is that just because someone’s your enemy, he’s not automatically a bad man.”
