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.

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

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.

My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both.

A voice in my head said, can’t be helped. Why do I listen to those voices? 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.

I fell in love for the first time at the age of thirty-four. It’s like other childhood ailments. If you catch it when you’re a kid, it doesn’t do much harm, and then you’re basically immune. But if you get it when you’re grown up, it can be very serious indeed.