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

by Lois McMaster Bujold

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

Animals were innocent, even the grisly crows; that innocence surely made them all a little sacred.

“A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He—or she—freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.”

“Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?

“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.

Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

He claims that the gods, and we, are both right here all the time, a shadow’s thickness apart.

Perhaps heaven was not a place, but merely an angle of view, a vantage, a perspective.

“You were the soberest fellow I ever met, and now you grin all the time. Caz, are you sure She got your soul back in right way round?” Cazaril laughed out loud. “Maybe not! You know how it is when you travel. You pack all your things in your saddlebags, and by the journey’s end, they seem to have doubled in volume and are hanging out every which way, even though you’d swear you added nothing…” He patted his thigh. “Perhaps I am just not packed into this battered old case as neatly as I used to be.”