He Who Fights with Monsters (He Who Fights with Monsters, #1)

by Shirtaloon

“What about dwarves?” Jason asked. “Gnomes? Non-copyrighted small people who live inside hillocks?”

“Humans have something of a bad reputation when it comes to other races.” “I can believe it,” Jason said. “My world only has humans and we’re still awful to one another.

Do you have aristocracy in your world?” “Sure,” Jason said. “We’re slowly phasing it out in favour of wealth-based oligarchy, but it’s still around.”

“To truly break through your limits, you must truly push up against them. Only with genuine danger can you go further and do more than you ever thought possible.”

“If you stay quiet when you wished you’d said something,” Jason said, “that regret builds up. Starts eating you from the inside, and there’s no potion for that.”

“Sure there is,” Jory said. “It’s called liquor. Another alchemist friend of mine has a distillery not too far from here.” “That’s not a cure,” Jason said. “That’s setting yourself on fire to ward off the cold.”

“You let them make their mistakes when those mistakes are less likely to kill them,”

He said you never learn who you are when everything goes right. It’s in your darkest hour that you understand what it is to be an adventurer.”

“When you’re just a face in the crowd, then you can hold an ideal without being required to live up to it.

Being a good person means being good when the choices are hard, and there’s a price to that.”

“Your house, your rules,” Jason said. “My mother had a similar attitude.”

“If you look at a pond and see a moon,” she said, “is that moon within the pond, or is it a reflection of something much greater, very far away?”

“I don’t think being numb to it all makes you strong,” Jason said. “Strong is accepting the choices you make and owning up to the consequences.”

“Standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves is a virtue. But if acting on that virtue puts more hurt into the world than it takes away? Is that still moral?”

“Yes, but I’m coming to realise it doesn’t get me anywhere. The snake slithering across the lawn gets shot. The one waiting for the toddler to wander near the tall grass gets fed.”