A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness, #1)

by Joe Abercrombie

But it was not the pain that really shook her. It was the powerlessness. The total misjudgement of her own abilities. The curtain had been twitched aside, and she saw just how fragile she was. How fragile anyone was, compared to a sword swung in anger. The world was a different place than it had been a few moments before, and not a better one.

“Fencing is one thing,” he said. “Actual violence quite another. Few of us are made for it. It is healthy to be disabused of our self-deceptions every now and then, even if it hurts.”

Believe it or not, we all want what’s best. The root o’ the world’s ills is that no one can agree on what it is.”

Some men are like water. No matter how high they are lifted, they always yearn to return to the appropriate level.

Why folk insisted on singing about great warriors all the time, Rikke couldn’t have said. Why not sing about really good fishermen, or bakers, or roofers, or some other folk who actually left the world a better place, rather than heaping up corpses and setting fire to things?

But that’s the nice thing about looking backwards. You can pick out the bits that suit your story and toss the unhappy truths to the wind.

She had always known life was hard in these slums, but if she had thought about it at all, she had pictured a romantic version. A version that was easy to live with. Pretty children, giggling as they frolicked in the gutters. Old women cackling as they boiled bones in a pot. Strapping men slapping one another on the back, singing good old work songs in harmony as they sat around a fire made from their last sticks of furniture. Oh, the sisterhood, the spirit, the nobility of poverty!

And yet living this way did not make Savine sorry for the people who were forced to do it every day. Who did it in the many buildings just like this one she profited from all across the Union. It only made her desperate never to live this way herself again. Perhaps that made her selfish. Wicked. Evil, even. While she fled whimpering through the city on the day of the uprising, she had sworn to a God she did not believe in that she would be good, if it meant she could live.

Truly clever things are said with short words. Long ones are used to hide stupidity.

Strange, in a way, for men who’d been fixed on killing each other a few hours before to be happily mingling, stamping and blowing and polishing their shield-rims, mulling over fights long past, the fight just done and the fight to come. But then warriors on different sides always had more in common with each other than with anyone else.

You’ve got to try to look on the sunny side or you’ll spend your life in darkness.”

“There’s no forgetting. I’m hemmed in by the memories.” And he flapped an arm about as though the shadows were full of an invisible crowd. “Besieged by the bastards. The hurts and the regrets. The friends and the enemies and those who were a bit o’ both. Too long a lifetime of ’em. You can’t choose what you remember. But you can choose what you do about it. Time comes… you got to let it all go.” He smiled sadly down at the tabletop. “So you can go back to the mud without the baggage.”

Rikke plucked at her shirt. It had stuck around her armpits with the heat of all these people lying to each other.