Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (The Siege #1)

by K.J. Parker

the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it.

When Engineers do it, it isn’t running away; it’s withdrawing in good order, or simply relocating.

My job is for it all to be my fault. So, if the men followed me out of love (you can use a different word, but that’s what it amounts to) and I got them all killed – my fault. My responsibility.

Still, if you need to knock in a nail and you don’t have a hammer, use the heel of your broken-down old boot.

The trouble with now is, it’s over in a heartbeat, and then you’ve got to think of something else.

“Everyone keeps telling me what I can’t do, but they’re wrong. The only thing I can’t do is nothing.”

“You can’t bypass the system,” she said. “I know it’s the enemy, but you can’t do anything without it.”

Personally I’ve never had a problem with lies, so long as they serve a useful purpose. Lies have consistently and reliably done me far more good than the truth. The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.

Not us against them but us against us, because that’s what people are really like, that’s what they actually want.

Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it’s just you and you know you’re basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

I mention this because that’s how the world changes. It’s either so quick that we never know what hit us, or so gradual that we don’t notice.

fact isn’t a democratic process; if a thing isn’t true it isn’t true, even if everybody votes that it is.

people were actually thinking without me having to tell them to).

I’d long since passed the point where I was having good ideas or making any sense, and it didn’t seem to matter. Other people were coping.

The noise was very loud, and I’d lost the ability to analyse it or understand it, tell bowstrings from catapult sliders or orders from yells of pain. I’d never been useless before. I didn’t enjoy it.