The White Luck Warrior Quotes

“Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to the Outside to call them to harsh accout. One hundred Heavens . . . for one thousand Hells.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.

To know the world will never be so bad.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Master,” Malowebi once asked, “what is the path to truth?” “Ah, little Malo,” old Zabwiri had replied, “the answer is not so difficult as you think. The trick is to learn how to pick out fools. Look for those who think things simple, who abhor uncertainty, and who are incapable of setting aside their summary judgment. And above all, look for those who believe flattering things. They are the true path to wisdom. For the claims they find the most absurd or offensive will be the ones most worthy of your attention.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty--that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best--cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone makes the same claimsof virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are.
. . .
Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame . . .
And he loved her the more for it.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Dreams are the darkness that only slumber can illuminate.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life,” Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. “Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they’re certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they’re certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised …” “And so they judge,” Mimara said sourly.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Gone were the antique rivalries, the mortal hatred that had so often set them against each other. Gone were the differences. And it seemed a thing of mad and tragic folly that Men might raise arms against Men, when creatures so vile so infested the world.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Gods are but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“The same lyric, hollered out over and over, like a sacred intonation. It became a banner, a scrap of purity hoisted high above a polluted world, and none would relinquish it. A call and a promise. A curse and a prayer. And the Shining Men matched the Sranc and their preternatural fury, roared singing as they stove skulls and spilled entrails. In one mad voice they fumbled for their faith, raised high the shield of their belief … And became unconquerable.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“There was an absurdity to places far, a sense of insignificant people scratching meaningless earth. Let them die, she would sometimes think, whenever she heard tidings of famine in Ainon or plague in Nilnamesh. What are these people to me? These places? A fool … that’s what she had been.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“Knowing. This was the great irony. Knowing was the foundation of ignorance. To think that one knew was to become utterly blind to the unknown.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“You see more when you speak less. First your eyes turn outward, the thoughtless way they always turn outward when you have spoken your say: to await a response, to gauge the effectiveness of your lies. But when your voice is bricked over, when you are robbed of the very possibility of speaking, your eyes are left hanging. And like bored children they begin inventing things to do. Like observing things otherwise unseen.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two (Vol. 2)

“We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one’s own deception is to accuse others of deceit.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“But the fear she feels now forbids all action. It gags her, as certainly as the Wizard had been gagged. Even her wailing is caught in the fist of her breast. It empties her limbs of blood. The fear that taught prayer to Men.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“She recalls Achamian’s description of Nonmen Erratics, how their memories of mundane life fade first, leaving only archipelagos of spectacle and intensity, the confusion of a soul hanging without foundation. And how their redemptive memories gradually follow, stranding them more and more with disconnected episodes of torment and pain, until their life becomes a nightmare lived through mist, until all love and joy sink into oblivion, become things guessed at through the shadows cast by their destruction. This, she realizes. This is the prize the Captain has cast upon the balance of their transaction. Cleric yields up his power, and Lord Kosoter offers him memory. Men to love. Men to destroy … Men to remember.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“The shape of virtue is inked in obscenity.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“In the wild lore of witches—those scraps that Achamian had encountered, anyway—great trees were as much living souls as they were conduits of power. One hundred years to awake, the maxim went. One hundred years for the spark of sentience to catch and burn as a slow and often resentful flame. Trees begrudged the quick, the old witches believed. They hated as only the perpetually confused could hate. And when they rooted across blooded ground, their slow-creaking souls took on the shape of the souls lost. Even after a thousand years, after innumerable punitive burnings, the Thousand Temples had been unable to stamp out the ancient practice of tree-burial. Among the Ainoni, in particular, caste-noble mothers buried rather than burned their children, so they might plant a gold-leaf sycamore upon the grave—and so create a place where they could sit with the presence of their lost child … Or as the Shrial Priests claimed, the diabolical simulacrum of that presence. For his part, Achamian did not know what to believe. All he knew was that the Mop was no ordinary forest and that the encircling trees were no ordinary trees. Crypts, Pokwas had called them. A legion of sounds washed through the night.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

“And now, when he needed a brother more than at any time in his life, he was not even sure he possessed a friend.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior