The Last Witness Quotes

“To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness

“Being dead is bad enough. Being dead and still having to walk around and eat is so much worse.”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness

“Consider it this way. The present is a split second, so tiny and trivial as to be immaterial. Everything else, everything real and substantial, is a coral reef of dead split seconds, forming the islands and continents of our reality. Every moment is a brick in the wall of the past, building enormous structures that have identity and meaning, cities we live in. The future is wet shapeless clay, the present is so brief it barely exists, but the past houses and shelters us, gives us a home and a name; and the mortar that binds those bricks, that stops them from sliding apart into a nettle-shrouded ruin, is memory.”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness

“I figure a friend has the right to offend you at least once.”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness

“After all, what is truth but the consensus of memories of reliable witnesses?”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness