The Great Ordeal Quotes

“Better blind in Hell than speechless in Heaven. —”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“more than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives. No tyranny was so complete as blindness.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Power does not make safe. History murders the children of weak rulers.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“What did they know of motherhood, the mad miracle of finding your interior drawn from you, clinging and bawling and giggling and learning everything there was to learn anew?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Hope is ever the greatest luxury of the helpless, the capacity to suppose knowledge that circumstances denied.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“And it renewed him. It made him whole. For hatred, as much as love, blessed souls with meaning, a more terrible grace.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Ever is manner the oracle of the man. Ever does our carriage betray our souls.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Better blind in Hell than speechless in Heaven.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Toil, harsh and relentless, has a way of twisting hope into self-consuming circles. Battle peril long enough, she has learned, and you will come to see salvation in your doom.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Desperation glares in all Men, but it burns as a beacon when it takes a King for tinder.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Give a life to the right sort of man, Saubon had learned, and that man would wager that life no matter what the throw.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“When so much is so mad, what can become of proportion?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“The Dolour itself is invisible … all you ever see are cracks of fear and incomprehension where before all was seamless … thoughtless … certain. Soon you dwell in perpetual outrage, but are too fearful to voice it, because even though you know everything is the same, you no longer trust those you have loved to agree, so spiteful they have become! Their concern becomes condescension. Their wariness becomes conspiracy. “And so the Weal becomes the Dolour, so the Intact become the Erratic. Think on it, mortal King, the way melancholy is prone to make you cruel, impatient of weaknesses. Your soul slowly disassembles, fragments into disconnected traumas, losses, pains. A cowardly word. A lover’s betrayal. An infant’s last, laboured breath. And for the heroes among us, the heartbreak commensurate with their breathtaking glory …”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“The radiant Cilcûliccas, named the Lord of Swans for his preposterous luck. The crimson armoured Sûjara-nin, the Farthrown, a Dispossessed Son of Siöl. Cu’mimiral Dragon-gored, who was called Lord Limper …”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Confusion was ever the herald of genuine insight”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“the hot glare of evening winked into the chill glow of dusk in a heartbeat”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“She acted for reasons she knew not, spoke words she did not understand, pursuing ends that she could neither fathom nor bear. The”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“Desperation glares in all Men, but it burns as a beacon when it takes a King for tinder. A”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“to observe a thing always is to observe a thing not at all.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal

“One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten. Heartbroken,”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Great Ordeal