More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“You’re the best there is. No one can replace you.” Unexpectedly, the White chuckled. “Words every megalomaniac longs to hear. But true only of the truly bad and the monumentally great. I am neither, Karris. I am merely competent, my failures significant and sadly frequent. That I am not bad perhaps makes me better than many a White before me, but the good and the great are two disparate camps that rarely overlap.”
“What’s the difference?!” Karris shouted. Gill Greyling poked his head out the door, and he and Gavin came outside, but stayed where they were at the White’s gesture. They stood impassively in the rain, but Karris knew that stance, like a leashed hound, ready to attack at a word. “One is shame, and one is honor, and if you can’t tell the difference, you have greater problems than we can address,” the White said.
“In this life, we are not garments which may be washed and worn again, Karris. We are candles, giving light and heat until we are consumed. You burned more brightly than most. It has a cost. Mediocrities like me? Dim flames burn longer.”
I know you think you’re so strong nothing can break you. It’s a comforting lie, but don’t test it.
The whims of the great crushed the lives of those who labored beneath them. Bringing yourself to their attention was always risky.
You don’t stop and make death a sure thing just because going on might result in death.
When you surrender what isn’t under your control, you’re not giving up a crown, you’re giving up a yoke.
“This is why there are few prophets. We end up dead a lot. The truth is offensive to men who love darkness.”
“Should I make that storm come upon us with lightning and fire?” Orholam asked. “I thought you weren’t supposed to abuse your power,” Gavin said. “Ah. True. I forgot.” He drank. “Looks like it’s coming this way anyway.”
“Is everyone on the sea mad?” Gavin asked. “A little madness keeps you from going crazy,”
“Kindness can break chains that cunning cannot.”
“We are all of us frauds. We are all of us frauds, and we are all of us doing the best we can to hold up a tower of illusions and ill-placed hopes.
“Slow is a nice way of saying stupid,”
Power is the ultimate test of a man. The more you’re given, the more opportunities for corruption. That many fail the test doesn’t mean Orholam is wrong; it means that men are free. And great souls succeed or fail spectacularly.”
“When you have lived either a very short time or a very long time—if you’ve lived well—you will be able to love easily, too. Broken hearts have fresh places to bond with new faces.”
“Kip, Orholam walks men through fires every day. I believe that. But before you walk through fire, make certain it’s one he’s asked you to walk through.”
“Breaker, fortune favors the bold … but don’t be bold with me again.”
Kip cursed under his breath. “I really hate you, Grinwoody,” he said. Grinwoody gave a thin-lipped grin. “The heart breaks, sir.”
Kip paused, his bravado leaking out like urine down a coward’s leg.
“Kip, a man only gets so many chances to start over in a life, or in a conversation. Don’t miss an important one.” Beast or not, it was good advice. Kip held his tongue.
“A great strategist once said every military disaster could be summed up in two words: ‘Too late.’ When a plan fails, you don’t wring your hands, you move to the next one.”
“But the world is a spoiled child; it cannot long stand guardians, even when it needs them most.”
“The only way out of an arms race is to win,” Ben-hadad said. “In such victories, all men lose,” Cruxer said. “Better to lose your idealism than your life,” Kip said.
“Swords are dulled with constant use, wits, sharpened,”
I didn’t fail. God failed.” “Those two words cannot be put together in any way that makes sense.” “God failed me.” “Because an earnest prayer cannot be answered no?”
“Knowing I would die for you, how would you live if you were worthy of that sacrifice? Live that way,” Cruxer said. “Simple, huh?” Kip asked sardonically. “Simple. Not easy.”
“Brutality oft accomplishes what creativity cannot.”
“No one’s saying the Chromeria is perfect, Teia. There’s a price for law, and we see that all around us. The Chromeria has power, and in places, it abuses its power. Welcome to the human race. Lawlessness has a price, too.
“Don’t judge a man by what he says his ideals are, judge him by what he does.
“There’s a hope that empowers, and a hope that enfeebles. Don’t confuse them.”
The damage done by wights has been done through ignorance. One doesn’t punish ignorance with death. One fights it with knowledge. Not darkness, but light.
hatred and envy birth self-destruction in every heart that gives them a bed to breed in.
“Those assholes,” Kip said. “Long dead and still causing problems.”
A good commander knows the strength of his men and pushes them to the edge of it, but not over. A good man knows his own strength and does the same.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered why so much of your approved history starts only four hundred years ago?” “That was when Lucidonius came. No empire likes to laud that which came before it.” Gavin shrugged. “Simple exercise in maintaining power. Bury the past until you’re sure it’s dead.”
“That you have been given a great intellect is not something to be proud of; it is a burden to bear. It is muscle to be used in lifting greater weights than others can lift.
“This is war; innocents die for the sins of the powerful.”
Held too long, stubbornness is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
Good thing fear is rational. Good thing you can talk yourself right out of it.
This is why the owl hunts at night; her eyes would burn in the sun. This is why man sees only his slim slice of the spectrum. To see more would be to be blinded. To see that for which his mind is not made was to be struck dumb.
“We each tend to think of our time as the end product of all that has come before, which is true, but we like to believe our time is therefore the pinnacle, rather than another pearl on the string.
If I were in charge, things would be better. Said every tyrant ever.
“If you’re looking for justice, look not to earth, Breaker.”
“What good are the trappings of honor if the honor itself is dead?”
But more choices in a limited time didn’t mean you could do everything—it meant that you could do anything, so you probably did nothing, frozen with indecision.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all.
