The Craft Sequence: The First Five Novels (Craft Sequence #1-5)

by Max Gladstone

You don’t have to take off your shoes—since this place only exists rhetorically, the floors are easy to clean.

Tara had learned that the best lies were lies not told.

She told herself to relax. She had done nothing wrong. Of course, in her experience, this rarely meant one had nothing to fear from the authorities.

A penthouse apartment has much the same view as a cardboard box on a tenement roof. The resident of each drinks his wine and calls the other a fool, and seldom is either certain in his laughter.

there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body. It was warmer here.

“What kind of joke is that?” “The kind where I make light of your nearly killing yourself.” “I knew what I was doing.” “So do most suicides.”

Engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict.”

She spoke briefly to their leader, passed him a sliver of silver. Half-formed melodies and scales cohered: the bass the spine, the drums ribs, the piano and horn meat and sinews of music.

Sixty years ago, these men and women broke the heavens, and made the gods weep. They had spent the time since learning how hard it was to run a world.

“No sense worrying about the game before we see the cards.”

Sometimes we have ugly assignments. Sometimes the world is ugly.

“The trouble with atheism,” Temoc said, “is that it offers a limited range of curses.”

“All my bits fit together, at least according to the doctors.”

“Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.”

“Nothing I have said so far would stand as evidence in any court, but one of the few advantages of private contemplation over the paid variety is that I am not compelled to present my logic in court.”

“We make our own choices. If we are lucky, we last long enough to live with them.”

“The best stuff to steal is stuff the target can’t admit is gone.”

“You think there was a time where we didn’t do horrible things?” He shook his head. “It’s always happened.

man is an honor to be earned. It is not a state that remains when all else is ripped away.”

The Major will settle for nothing less than peace on earth and goodwill toward men, even if he has to kill everyone on the planet to achieve it.”

Nothing for it. Sometimes even a necromancer had to appear in public. At least there were fewer torches and pitchforks than usual, so far.

“I won’t sleep.” “Me neither. But at least we won’t sleep together.”

The coffee tasted foul. Not the coffee’s fault. Ambrosia would have tasted the same.

She left, and spent a quarter-hour searching for a nurse who didn’t look too busy to interrupt. As the clock ticked toward midnight, she decided that looking too busy to interrupt was likely a survival trait for nurses.

Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.

“You’re an asshole,” she told him, without rancor. What rancor could there be in a statement of fact?

The nobility of the position seemed less clear when you were making just enough to trigger your student loans but not enough to pay them back.

Tara unclenched her hand. Murdering members of the press was generally frowned upon in polite society.

She never liked swimming. She liked it less in the ocean, and even less at night, but duty and preference were rare bedfellows. Not even bedfellows, she thought as the black water closed over her. They’d had one bitter night when duty and honor were on a break and preference was too drunk to remember she hated duty’s smirk and the way he treated waiters.

The weak-willed gratified themselves with needless displays of power.

“I go nowhere without a reason, preferably several.

honestly, I know you’ve had a rough few decades, but I wish things like don’t attack the immensely powerful necromancer we’ve come to ask for help could go unsaid.”

“Friends drink with you,” she said when the glass was half-done. “Good friends make you hydrate.”

It’s not unknowable. Just unknown.

“Drag me to the hospital. I’d like to beat the rush.”