The Curse of Chalion (World of the Five Gods, #1)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.

Besides those two, he didn’t think there had been a defeat in the last decade he’d missed.

How strangely we are blinded by the surfaces of things.

Cazaril swallowed. “I think…I think if you lent me a razor now, for me to cut my throat with, it would save ever so many steps. Please Your Grace.”

Cazaril had to allow Umegat’s wine this much merit—it did mean he spent the first few hours of the next morning wishing for death rather than dreading it.

“Royesse, I don’t need to see a physician!” And I most especially don’t need a physician to see me.

“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.” “Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice—if not whether, then how, they may endure.”

The gods’ most savage curses come to us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

“Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.” The