The Wisdom of Crowds (The Age of Madness #3)

by Joe Abercrombie

And she was right, Fates help him. Judge was trouble made flesh. The monster off the leash. She was madness, and fire, and violence, and all the things he’d told himself he didn’t want. But here’s the sorry truth—if you really don’t want a thing, you don’t have to keep telling yourself so.

alright joe. I see you

And none are more fanatical in their faith than the convert.

“They’re monsters,” Orso heard her whisper. “I almost wish they were,” he muttered. “That would be easier. But they’re just people.”

“Future generations might never believe that it happened.” She blew some yellow hair out of her face with a smoky breath and went back to sketching, charcoal hissing on paper. “Then it might happen again.”

“The past has never interested me. For better or worse it is done, and set, and littered with disappointments as a battlefield is littered with the dead. But the future is a ploughed field, full of potential. The future we can twist into wonderful shapes.

“History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man’s right and another’s. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”

“You know the trouble with a pretty face?” Judge was saying. “People get used to its advantages, and when it’s took away, they lack the wherewithal to make a success of themselves. Nothing sadder’n a person who used to be beautiful. They have this desperate smile. Like me, it says. Like me, even though there’s nothing left to like.”

Life can be horrible,” she said, jabbing her thumb at dead Juvens. “But life can be delightful, too,” pointing up at Kanedias and his sea of fire. “There’s its real beauty, eh? In its range.

Shes crazy but shes right

One cannot climb high without standing on others, and all she had wanted was to reach the top. What a waste it all seemed now. There is nothing at the summit, in the end, but a long drop.

Her mother had always warned her a man is judged by his best moment, a woman by her worst.

“Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”

For a moment, Savine felt a sucking of terror. As if they might see through her, to all the secrets, and the guilt, and the things she wished she had not done. As if they might denounce her on the spot and drag her to the Tower of Chains.

The past isn’t made of facts, not really, just stories people tell to make themselves feel better. To make themselves look better.

“Everyone likes me,” droned the most feared man in the North, swaying in his saddle.

Rofl

“I could’ve told you that when I saw all the bloody flags. Flags never add to a man, d’you see, just stand in for something he’s missing.

“The Master Maker forged mine,” said Caul Shivers, in that broken whisper of his. “It never gets blunt.”