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Instead, he was going to have to think of something else; annoying and difficult, because it’s always harder to find a satisfactory answer to a problem when you already know the right answer but aren’t allowed to use it.
No big deal, Death insisted. Love is a confidence trick, that’s all. It’s Nature’s way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing.
people doing pointless, impossible things because they felt they had to, for reasons that didn’t stand up when you looked at them logically.
If I dropped dead tomorrow, he thought, it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody. Which, in a very real sense, is true freedom.
What a wonderful magic politics is, Psellus thought; it can recognize the truth and still override it, providing you can get consensus among the people who matter.
A man gathers a life around him like a hedgehog collecting leaves on its spines; what sticks to you defines you, and without them you’re bare, defenseless, a yolk without a shell.
Turning your back on love is the only freedom.
Duty is obligation, the bastard child of loyalty and the will to serve; when you think about it, just another roundabout way of saying love. No wonder it causes so much pointless damage.
I console myself with the thought that it’s not just stupid people who do stupid things.
Hope is really just a variety of fear, all the more painful because it twitches a chance of escape in front of your nose as it slides by.
Nasty business needs nasty people. The pure in heart only fuck things up and get people killed.”
