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When you love a person, you are expected to give them their freedom, but when you love a monster, you keep it caged. A monster can’t love you back, so there’s none of the guilt of a reciprocal relationship. You’re already subjugated. You’re already holding yourself captive in a cruel way, so you justify whatever unusual bonds you level in return.

People have admired rocs for centuries. Artists paint them, sculpt them, tell stories about them. I wanted to be one. I wanted to be the monster that kills other monsters.

That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

A bad foster home teaches a child a lot of things, but most of all to identify danger.

Joar closed his eyes as if he was really trying to memorize it. He wasn’t scared of death, because he had never expected to live a long life. He knew that happiness existed, but not for him. He believed in Heaven, that good people lived forever, just not that he was one of them. All he wanted was for his mom to be safe and for the artist to have a big life.

“He used to snore.”

“Fish too! Like, really badly! It sounded like someone strangling a dinosaur!” 😂😂😂

They stare at each other, the thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old, with funerals in their eyes. It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else. 🥹

Life is long, his friend had said in the hospital, but he didn’t mention the fact that almost every moment hurts when you have to live it alone.

Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death.

Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our life.

Joar was good at mending engines, because in them he could always see what was broken, but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts.

We know that because all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: “Did you know this is an old church?” Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

Death didn’t even seem like the worst-case scenario in her book.

Jakob had never been much with words. But in the language of violence, he was a poet.

My greatest battles I fought against myself, and they were all defeats, and I’ve suffered far less than I deserve.

'...So I sacrificed everything and everyone. I covered myself in glory and steeped myself in blood. And there, at the summit of a hill of corpses, I reached my destiny, and passed through it to the other side …’ He slowly opened his aching fingers, and let his hand fall. ‘Where there was nothing. And I saw I’d never followed God’s plan, only the lies I told myself to justify my greed and my ambition.’

Patience was the foremost of the Twelve Virtues, the one from which all others flowed, as Brother Diaz would no doubt have boringly lectured. In the end, time gives everyone the kick in the sack they deserve.

Brother Diaz had never imagined he might rejoice to see the blackest of Black Art practised before his very eyes, but now he punched the air.

A problem for men that are much loved … or much feared … is that no one will tell them hard truths.

Jakob had fought many duels. A lifetime of them.

Enough to know when he wasn’t going to win.

Sunny once heard it said that loaves are all about the grooves. They won’t rise properly without them. Maybe people are the same.

They’ll never come out well unless they’re cut a bit.

Each man found out who he was, on that endless expanse of mud and torment.

Jakob found out who he was. And he hadn’t liked the bastard very much.

They’d thought they were the animals, they were the scary ones, but now they bore witness to the beast indeed and reeled about eyes rolling and fell and scrambled away whimpering with terror. The Vigga-Wolf remembered through a mist that everything that walked, crawled, or flew was always terrified of her.

All she had to do was sell a lie, and wasn’t she a liar? She’d played so many parts she hardly knew which one was her. She was an onion made of only skins with nothing at the centre.

There really is nothing romantic about a punch in the gut from someone twice your size, specially when the best you’ve got to look forward to is another.

At eight the bar was emptied of all but those whose goal was alcoholism. 😂

They had happiness and happiness was so rare in this day of the present. More rare than precious things, jewels and myrrh. Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver.

I always figured I’d die heroically. Instead, I died because my cat is an asshole.

Dogs barked in the distance—pain, loss, worry. Markan had one rule: never kill a dog. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He had many rules: never kill a child, don’t eat yellow snow, never trust a fart after Gourath’s stew, if you stab something and it moves stab it again. The list was actually quite an extensive one when he thought about it. But 'never kill a dog' took precedence above all others.