Penitent Quotes

“Sometimes the threat is so grave, the worst of enemies must become the best of friends.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“All is deceit. Nothing wears a true face or uses a true name. Nothing is as it appears to be, as if the whole universe were busily playing out a function, ‘guised in cunning. The mad are sane, the blind can see, the sane are otherwise demented, good is evil, and up, for all I care, is down.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“I thought I had trained you well, Beta,' she said, 'but I see I must reinforce the most basic conditioning. Know yourself. Understand yourself. In this life, most answers lie within, or in plain view right in front of us. They can be seen with ease if you but take the time to look.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“Look into my head, sir, into my soul, and tell me how clearly delineated good and evil seem to me. Nothing can be trusted, nothing aligns where it should align, and archenemies make friends of each other-'

'The sad truth is,' he replied, 'that is the story of our cosmos. I do not say that to alarm you, but my experience has ever been that our Imperium, behind its bright banners and proud sermons, is far from the solid edifice we like to imagine. It is, at best, decayed and stagnant, and at worst rotten through.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“I was seeing patterns that were not patterns, and appreciating symbols that were not symbols, just as I had done with the bone markers. All my life, I had wanted to make sense of the world, and that desire had become so desperate, I was manufacturing sense. There were no myths. I was a woman lost in a bonehouse, bewildered by the darkness. The world had no sense to offer me, for it had none, and all the signs and signifiers were not symbols for anything.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“Our work smacked of magic, of necromantik dabbling. It reeked of forbidden lore, and of the ravings of mad heretics and doomed sorcerers. There was no cold science in it, no golden path, no trusted fact or true knowledge. Ravenor feared it, and he despised it. He knew how seductive it could be, how beguiling, how addictive. He knew how easily it could go wrong, and how badly. He knew that to toy with it was hubris, that to pretend mastery of that which was infinite and masterless, was to begin a plunge into a midnight pit from which no one could return.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“I have used up my days believing I serve the Throne above all, but this is the filth I am dragged into.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘That’s something I might have said of my own life. Nothing wears an honest face. Those we admire disappoint us, or betray us. What truth may be found is uglier and more cruel than our worst expectations.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent

“Heretics are the only ones worth trusting,’ the voice said, ‘for they have everything to gain and everything to lose.”
― Dan Abnett, Penitent