The Liar’s Key (The Red Queen's War, #2)

by Mark Lawrence

My theory was that a long history of raiding each other had driven them to make their foodstuffs so foul that no one in their right mind would want to steal it.

The stars are pretty but the space between them is infinite and black with promise.’

What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.

man casts a million shadows, and yet you trap him within such a singular opinion.

The wise come into their majority out in the world, amid the muck and pain of living.

A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination.

It seems that the prospect of taming a dangerous reprobate who is unlikely to truly care for them is sweeter honey to some than, say, a strong and moral man like Snorri. Don’t ask me why.

Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters.

In the midst of such institutionalized theft on so grand a scale individual thievery could not be tolerated in any degree. Only by strict adherence to the rules of the theft could the illusion of it being lawful and civilized be maintained.

Those who stole money inside bank-law of course were very well rewarded, and known as bankers.

Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.

And the thing about people who don’t care if they live or die … the thing is … they die.