Do you know why the leaves change colour, Makin?" They did look spectacular. The forest had grown around us as we traveled and the canopy burned with colour, from deepest red to flame orange, an autumn fire spreading in defiance of the rain. "I don't...
Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.
We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.
Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.
Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I'm scared of immolation. Also spiders.
Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to ta...
Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his s...
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, ins...
There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.
Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn’t want to find myself impaled on it.
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim acro...
