A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (The Siege, #3)

by K.J. Parker

Death is prepared to wait. It’s always there for you, like your mother.

“I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life. It’d be greedy and selfish to want any more. It might mean someone else having to go without.”

Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.

Most people don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between movement and amelioration. They believe in the Promised Land. They also can’t get past the misconception that if you move away from something bad, inevitably you’re moving towards something better. This is just bad geometry, a total failure to understand the properties of a straight line, but never mind. Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.

It’s cold scientific fact that the universe is composed of two basic elements, Us and Them, always opposed in fundamental, irreconcilable conflict. The fact that we may like individual Them loads more than we like any of Us is neither here nor there. When it turns into an Us-against-Them issue, we can no more side with Them than water can flow uphill.

My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I’m not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn’t carry on the way it’s been so far.

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

There was a lot about change we can believe in and draining the swamp and yes we can, and the messengers trotted away looking cheerful, having met someone they felt they could do business with.

All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?

The thing about people who believe defeat is unthinkable is that they tend not to think. My kind of enemy.

All human life has value, even the lives of shitheads and arseholes, but then again, you can’t make omelettes, so on and so forth.