The Burning White (Lightbringer, #5)

by Brent Weeks

Ferkudi inhaled deeply, like a war-bound soldier carefully filling his mnemonic storehouses with the scent of his wife’s hair.

“How’d I ever find you?” he asked her. “The first time, I was sabotaging your initiation. I think the second was when I was jerking off your grandfather.”

‘Should we emphasize or de-emphasize the surprising and obvious power of his buttocks?’

Perhaps it was because she had to kill him, and you couldn’t let a target be fully human. A target was meat and blood and breath to be stilled, not a father, not a lover, not a leader you’d adored.

Sometimes, a hard kick in the ass can do what a soft word in the ear can’t.

Kip had just done the most brilliant and cynical thing of his entire political career: he’d listened to his wife.

Gunner’s voice was like a child pounding on the door when you’re in the middle of a bad lay: Gavin wasn’t enjoying himself as much as he’d expected, but what he was doing was a lot more enjoyable than what he was being called to do.

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

Canna go straight, no gatter how many second chances we met.” Gatter? Met? Matter. Get. No matter how many second chances we get.

The bouncy, ceaselessly grinning and hollering and spitting pirate who, having been raised amid a cacophony of accents himself, veered wildly between all of them and none, who covered his habitual malapropisms and neologisms by purposely creating as many as possible so that he might become larger than life—that legend was suddenly simply a slender Ilytian man, hitting middle age earlier than he ought, his face drawn, eyes haunted by things forever lost.

Sinking into sarcasm is the heart’s last rebellion against a mind choosing helplessness.

When your answers lead you logically to despair, you don’t have the wrong answers; you have the right answers—to the wrong questions.

Fuck the old way. Fuck the new way. As he had always been, he himself would be the third way.

Kip the Lip somehow managed to hold his words like a disciplined line of infantry holding its fire while enemy cavalry charged into range.

Of all the things that die, hope is the most easily resurrected.

People call others ‘gifted’ when they don’t want to believe they’re worse at something because they’re not willing to put in the work excellence requires.

’Tain’t fair, that. And I do believe in a fair taint.” “Then it’s no wonder you enjoyed your time with Pansy’s mother so much, Captain,” Gavin said, deadpan.

“You’re a crafty little cunt, ain’tcha, Guile?” Gavin said, “Once upon a time, I was actually reckoned a big cunt.”

“Eviscerating a man with his cannon will surely soothe any resentment he might have harbored for you swiving his wife.”

“A mirror turns quiet voices blaring, and can blind you to the whole you by distracting you with details. It breaks you into imperfect pieces of a body rather than integrate you into a whole person. A mirror pushes its will into you, Kip. So if you think a mirror only reflects, if you think a mirror shows you the way you really are, you won’t realize what it’s doing, and you won’t push back.

Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything. Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.

Prostitution was a business generally more concerned with pumping out a large volume of satisfied customers rather than pumping a large volume out of one satisfied customer.

If you’re trapped in the darkness all alone, how do you know you’re alone and not actually surrounded by an army of friends, also silent, also afraid in the dark, merely waiting for the sound of one voice to rouse them from fear, to fight for freedom?

For Ferkudi, the Box of Things That Don’t Make Sense But Make Sense to Other People Don’t Worry About It It’s Not Important was filled with many things: why people go back to lovers who treat them badly, why people like cats (pretty much the same thing), metaphors involving cutting cheese, why one would eat intestine, why women don’t spend all their time looking at themselves naked, why the number system was based on ten but the time system wasn’t, why it’s normal for dogs to lick their balls in public but Blackguards aren’t even allowed to clear their underwear from cleaving the moon, and why he got that question so often about being dropped on his head. As long as he had Cruxer’s assurance that it wasn’t important for him to figure out, he was perfectly content to put things in that box and put it away in a dark mental corner.

Still, there was the familiar jolt of excitement at being shot at with no effect. That bracing, ‘Holy shit! I’m alive and I could have been dead and someone just wanted me dead and did all they could to make me dead, but I’m alive, hell yeah, you bastards!’

“Remember to see yourself as you are in the eyes of those who love you.

Gavin had chosen to fight a creature whose strength was tied to the intensity of the sunlight . . . on the longest fucking day of the year.

War is the wily orator who gets us cheering horrors.

“We know ourselves by how we see ourselves mirrored in others’ eyes. So when a man lies habitually, he distorts the mirror he holds up to the world. In fooling others, he loses himself. Those who praise him? Those who love him? He knows they must simply be fools. He hates himself because there’s a gap between what he is and what he believes himself to be. If the gap grows too large, it becomes a tear, a schism.

Warriors know how to honor a hero’s sacrifice: first you finish the fucking fight.

‘Dead winners and dead losers have only one thing in common. Unfortunately, it’s the most important thing.’

Do you know what humans can do? We can suffer. If you just give us one solid thing to brace our will against, we will move the world.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Dying makes me grumpy, sir.”

“We keep secret what we fear makes us weak, not realizing in our fear that it is the keeping of secrets itself that weakens us.”

We see others not as they are but as we see. We see ourselves not as we are but as we see—and as we are seen, for we each cast our light on each other, too. Surrounded by those who cast only brutal light, we see some truth, and sometimes necessary truth, but a lie if we think it all the truth.