If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?
The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.
Life’s a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.
I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.
Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man’s efficiency.
A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.
Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.
Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.
I’m a fucking coward.””Maybe.” Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun’s corpse. “There’s a hero. Tell me who’s better off.
So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You’re a hero.
Remember, though, that you are the king’s observer, not the king’s champion.
…Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field
Every war carries within it the seeds of the next.
Armour… is part of a state of mind… in which you admit the possibility… of being hit.
The world is all change, my friend. We all would like to go back, but the past is done. We must look forwards. We must change ourselves, however painful it may be, or be left behind.
One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.
A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success.
Are you entirely sure of that knot?’ asked Morveer. ‘There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop’.’Twenty-eight strides’, said Friendly.’What?”The drop’.A brief pause, ‘That is not helpful’.
The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.
Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.
Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.
Memories sharp enough to cut himself on – the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.
By swap news do you mean drink?” “I do, and that excessively.
it was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion
The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do…
It’s a crime, when you think about how little time we get, that a man should ever be bored. When you are lying on your death bead, I expect you regret those weeks wasted more than your worst mistakes.
The Inquisitor waited for silence. “Do you believe in anything?””Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.
Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.
Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it.
A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance
It’s hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It’s hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you’ve had him for long enough.
The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense.
You can always make enemies of your friends,’ said Sumael. ‘Making friends of your enemies is harder labor.
I apologise, your Highness. Murder can be a painful business.
But you know what they say – old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.
You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain’t long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.
It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.
The Bloody-Nine opened his mouth, and shrieked out all of his bottomless love and his endless hate in one long wail.
Hurray’, shouted Glokta. ‘Porridge again!’He looked over at the motionless Practical. ‘Porridge and honey, better than money, everything’s funny, with porridge and honey!
Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.
Have a smile for breakfast, you’ll be shitting joy by lunch.
You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.
When you’re in hell, only a devil can point the way out.
I want a chance to do it all again. To do it… right.
Sometimes, when someone lives in danger for too long, the only time they feel alive is when death’s breathing on their shoulder.
Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.
So the fox killed his brother, the wolf. (Mother Scaer)
Mercy and cowardice are the same,” she snapped out. “But you want their land, not their lives, no? Dead men can’t obey.
You want to be merciful. To stand in the light. I understand it. I admire it. But, my queen…Only the victors can be merciful.
To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.
The best steel doesn’t always shine the brightest.
Some men you stick to right off. But it’s those that take time to stick that stick longest.
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.
What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?
There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.
Luck is a woman. She’s drawn to those that least deserve her.
I’ve made peace with myself.Good for you. That’s the hardest war of all to win.Didn’t say I won. Just stopped fighting.
Give Bethod a kick from me, once you have him under your boot.””That I will, unless he gets me under his.””Never easy, kicking upwards.
You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza.”That brought a smile to the corner of her mouth. The corner he couldn’t see. “Well. Facts are facts.
Some men laugh easily. It makes them winning dinner companions.
He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment. ‘Shit!’ he roared at nothing.