Caine Black Knife Quotes

“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He's going to fucking well have to share.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.”
― Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Once you sand the corners off consequences, people start to get really fucking weird.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“It’s one thing to be a good guy because that’s who you are. It’s something else to be a good guy because you’re too much a fucking pussy to break the rules.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.”
― Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart”
― Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife

“You—” He blinked, closed his mouth, and tried again. “All I had to do was ask?” “You know how rare it is that anybody just asks?”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I shrugged. I shrug a lot these days. The more I know, the less I have to say.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“You can call me Jonathan Fist.” He frowned at me. “Jonathan Fist?” “He made a deal too.” “I don’t get it.” “That’s because you’re thinking in English. The original name is German.” He shook his head. “And?” I just shook my head. “Nobody fucking reads anymore, you know that?”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Luck? Just luck?” “That’s why you don’t see guys like me sitting around in our old age whining about what could have been. Because if we don’t get what we want, we’re not around to complain about it. We’re fucking well dead.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“The difference between you and me, Rababàl, is that I wanted to be a star more than I wanted to live. For you it was the other way around. We both got our wish.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Did you never figure this out? It wasn’t you, Michaelson. It was never you. It was the demon. What do you Monastics call them? Outside Powers. The one that runs the dil T’llan—that is the dil T’llan. I mean, Retreat from the Boedecken was the foundation of more than your career. It’s the foundation of your self-image. It made Caine into Caine. You think I didn’t watch you? You think I didn’t second-hand your adventures? How many times were you up against it and pulled yourself through by thinking of Retreat—how you’d been through worse and didn’t buckle? Retreat let you fool yourself into believing you were the baddest of the bad. The toughest of the tough. The guy who could take anything. Who could suck it up and spit it back out. And it was all because the first time you were really tested, you had a demon eating your fear. That’s what made you brave. It was eating your despair. That’s what made you strong. It was an illusion. A con. You were never that strong. You were never that brave. You’re no tougher than anybody else. Caine was a fake from the start—but you fooled yourself along with everybody else. You were just make-believe. That’s all. Make-believe.” I nodded. “Funny how shit works out, huh?” He stared at me with those wet eyes. “You think this was a mystery? I was Monastic, Rababàl. I knew it then.” I turned one of my strapped-down wrists so I could open a hand. “I take whatever edge I can find. That’s who I am.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Did you never figure this out? It wasn’t you, Michaelson. It was never you. It was the demon. What do you Monastics call them? Outside Powers. The one that runs the dil T’llan—that is the dil T’llan. I mean, Retreat from the Boedecken was the foundation of more than your career. It’s the foundation of your self-image. It made Caine into Caine. You think I didn’t watch you? You think I didn’t second-hand your adventures? How many times were you up against it and pulled yourself through by thinking of Retreat—how you’d been through worse and didn’t buckle? Retreat let you fool yourself into believing you were the baddest of the bad. The toughest of the tough. The guy who could take anything. Who could suck it up and spit it back out. And it was all because the first time you were really tested, you had a demon eating your fear. That’s what made you brave. It was eating your despair. That’s what made you strong. It was an illusion. A con. You were never that strong. You were never that brave. You’re no tougher than anybody else. Caine was a fake from the start—but you fooled yourself along with everybody else. You were just make-believe. That’s all. Make-believe.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Why is it the people who play by the rules—the people who just do their jobs and mind their manners and save their pay and really don’t want anything more out of life than one goddamned break end up working away their whole lives and every time it looks like one damned ray of sunshine might fall into their lives there’s some bastard with a shovel to tell you No, that’s just the mouth of your grave before he starts piling the dirt in on top of you.” His fingers twisted tight enough that his knuckles crackled like stiff cellophane. “That’s all I want to know, Michaelson. You explain it to me, then I’ll go tell the Board, and you can go ahead and cut my damned throat. Again.” “Cut your throat—did you play that fucking Adventure?” My”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“One of the books that Dad made me read—one that I’ve read again a few times on my own, in fact—was The Art of War. Because, like a lot of those old-timey Chinese guys, Sun Tzu had a gift for metaphor. The book isn’t just about war, it’s about handling conflict. You could even say it’s about how to live well in a dangerous world. One of the things Master Sun wrote is that a general who knows his enemy and knows himself need not fear the outcomes of a thousand battles. I knew my enemy. That was my edge. When I finally got a visitor, he seemed a little surprised to find me smiling.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I had time to think. Thinking—real thinking—is not something I do often, nor particularly well. I was never trained for it, and I sure as hell don’t have any natural inclination. Thinking gets in my way. In a fight it’s fatal. In the real world, instinct and experience are superior to thought; Tolstoy wrote that in a contest of cunning, the peasant consistently defeats the intellectual, and he was right. Not because the peasant is smarter but because he doesn’t have the self-doubt and the second thoughts and all the other mind tricks that make the intellectual out-think himself.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“This could have gotten interesting in an existentially satisfying way, but there was also the unfortunate possibility they might have come to some kind of civilized solution, and one of the problems with being a bad guy is that civilized solutions just never turn out well for you. Besides, it would have been plain sloppy to let this opportunity slip away. Not likely I’d get another.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I was only an hour outside the camp when the Studio pulled me. Two days later—before I even got out of the hospital—I finally realized why Khlaylock didn’t re-Challenge. He’d Challenged me for calling him a coward. Get it? He was afraid he’d lose. Again. No wonder he was pissed. We can forgive any crime except the murder of our illusions.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“If you’re ever in Seven Wells and you have a chance to stop by the Halls of Glory in the Great Holding of Dal’Kannith, you can see a really nice depiction by Rhathkinnan, the greatest living painter of Lipke: a fresco fifty feet high and three hundred feet long, Khlaylock’s Stand at the Ford. It’s got it all the first spray of dawn on the vast shadow-pocked face of the vertical city, swarms of uncountable thousands of Black Knives, Khlaylock doing a reasonable facsimile of Khryl Morning Goddamn Star Himself at the center of a rising hurricane of raggedly severed ogrillo body parts while on the opposite bank his cavalry shouts itself into battle order. I do not, by the way, appear in that painting. This is only partly because Rhathkhinnan—and the rest of the Order of Khryl—would kind of like to forget I was there at all. It’s mostly because I spent that battle learning the value of intellectual flexibility and improvisation under pressure.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“And looking back on it, I can see the leading edge of a running theme of my career. I don’t remember making a conscious choice in tactics when I picked the fight with Khlaylock; it just felt right. I could just as easily—more easily—have made the Challenge about our tactical dispute; by Khryl’s Law, I could have Challenged Khlaylock to let Khryl decide between us. Strictly business. But I made it personal. Because it was personal. At the bone, it’d be him and me, no matter what we were pretending to be fighting about. To bring the other shit into it would have been . . . well . . . Dishonest.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I held it in both hands, staring down at it until my arms started to ache. Not just a weapon. A symbol. The Morning Star. Enlightenment. The Dawn of Truth and Justice that Destroys the Night of Ignorance and Sin.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I wonder sometimes if that’s why I married my late wife: because, down deep, we both despised the man I really am. It was the only thing we had in common. I got over hating myself. Mostly. She didn’t. But let that go.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“but the real lesson of Heart of Darkness is that the jungle is always there, inside even the most civilized of us. It whispers shadow love in the twilit corners of our minds, and no matter how deaf we pretend to be, we can’t help but listen.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“This was not the real reason I made everyone eat ogrilloi either. The reason was another of those books Dad made me read. Heart of Darkness. There was one thing I never understood about that book: why people think Kurtz went crazy out there. The way I saw it—the way I still see it—Marlow was the crazy one. When Kurtz was murmuring the horror, the horror, I always figured he was talking about having to go back to Europe.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“I combined this principle with some basic concepts of guerrilla warfare I’d picked up from The Life of Geronimo. So when the Black Knives would come out in force, we’d circle behind and murder wounded in their camps. When they’d send out single-pack scouting parties, at least one entire pack, sometimes two or three if they weren’t too far apart, would vanish . . . and be found later as skinned corpses, missing their scent glands. If they posted pickets, we killed the pickets. If they picketed whole packs, well . . . Ogrilloi bunch up when threatened. It’s instinctive. So when spooky noises would start coming from the darkness, they’d drift together—then one swipe of the bladewand . . . We’d drag the bodies around before we skinned them and piled them up, to make it look to the Black Knives like we’d been able to kill the pack because we’d caught them spread too far apart. Get it?”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Screw tactics. All I needed was to remember some of those books Dad used to make me read. Such as War and Peace. According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov beat Napoleon on the French retreat from Moscow by refusing to do battle. He kept their armies in contact, so Napoleon could never relax—he had to keep his army in battle order at all times—but every time Napoleon would march out to fight, Kutuzov would retire. When Napoleon would go back to his camp, Kutuzov would advance: the military version of Push Hands.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“Dad used to say, “If you need to justify something, you shouldn’t have done it.” Like I said when I started this: it’s about what happened. Not why. So this is what happened.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“The armor was chrome steel, curves and angles of mirror that gleamed like dawn’s own rhodos goddamn dactylos in the lamplight. The guy inside was your basic snow-topped mountain of Biblical Patriarch, but in the blossom of mature strength—y’know, like that white brow and beard salted his face only to give the calm certainty in his eye a translucent shimmer of Revealed Truth.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“When bad guys try to take you somewhere by force, fight. Fight now. Because they’re taking you into their comfort zone. That’s why they’re not killing you where you are: because wherever you are, you still have a chance. For whatever reason. Witnesses. Police. Weapons. Escape routes. Something. That’s why they want to take you somewhere else. And once you get where they’re taking you, it’s over. Or it’s not over. Not for a long time. Fighting might get you killed. But it’s better than whatever’s waiting for you where they can take time to enjoy themselves.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife

“The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun. That’s how it is for me, anyway.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife