Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder Quotes

“I always come back to Saloninus's definition of a sword - a piece of metal with a slave on both ends.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“You get more wool off well-fed sheep than starving ones, and fat sheep don’t break out and go wandering off, and dead sheep are no use to anyone, except my former colleagues the crows.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“It’s nice to be coerced into a suicide mission at someone else’s expense for a change, instead of having to foot all the bills myself.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“(A few notes on the subject of beauty. I’m not sure I approve of it. Mostly, I guess, because it offends my notions of justice. Beauty is probably the most unfair advantage you can have, after all. It amazes me that the idealists who crucify people in the name of social justice have never declared war on beauty, which is totally and irredeemably unjust. Wealth and power can be acquired, theoretically by anybody given the right circumstances. Beauty, on the other hand, is something you can’t attain to, no matter how hard you try. Instead, it’s broadcast recklessly by hopelessly irresponsible angels; a bit like turning up at the door of an asylum for the criminally deranged and handing out weapons. Worse than that; the lunatics in the asylum were already unbalanced when they arrived. Beauty, on the other hand, grows with you, distorting you from childhood, as though you’d been born possessed by a demon. And if I sound like I’m being a bit negative about beauty, it’s probably because I grew up with my sister, and was able to see at first hand what it can do to a person. There’s that story, isn’t there, about the foxes who stole a baby princess and replaced her with a fox cub, enchanted to look human; and only the little blind page boy knew the princess was a fox, because he couldn’t see but he could smell.)”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“I don’t think it’s right that dead people should look just like living ones. They ought to shatter like pottery or deflate like a shirt taken off and dropped on the floor. It’s needlessly hurtful to remind the rest of us of what’s just been lost for ever, and if ever I come into the presence of the living God, I’ve half a mind to register a formal complaint.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“They like to show how smart they are.” Ten thousand years of scholarship summed up in eight words.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“Saloninus once said: when the last witness is finally dead, the truth becomes malleable, before setting hard. Memories, the past, are a territory with disputed sovereignty. But when the last witness dies, those memories are nobody’s business but yours; you own them outright; they’re yours to do what you like with.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder

“Essentially it’s a variant form of Saloninus’s Third Law (any human being is capable of doing any amount of work, always provided it’s not the work he’s supposed to be doing).”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder