Brian Staveley Quotes

The man still fighting last week's battle will always lose to the man already fighting tomorrow's,

Resist faith. Resist trust. Believe only in what you touch with your hands. The rest is error and air.

You had to admire her, and you had to do it fast, because she was about to get all kinds of killed.

Emptiness exists only when something else has been gouged away.

If you hope to play a part in this empire, Sanlitun had told her time and time again, you must learn to divorce your feelings from your face. The world sees what you allow it to see, judges you according to what you reveal.

It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.

Easier to recall a loosed falcon than a spoken word.

It takes work to keep the world whole. A simple thing like a cup needs to be cleaned each day, placed carefully back on the shelf, not dropped. A city, in its own way, is every bit as delicate. People move over the causeways, ply the canals with their oars, go between their markets and their homes, buy and barter, swindle and sell, and all the while, mostly unknowingly, they are holding that city together. Each civil word is a stitch knitting it tight. Every law observed, willingly or grudgingly, helps to bind the whole. Every tradition, every social more, every act of neighborly goodwill is a stay against chaos. So many souls, so much effort, so difficult to create and so simple to shatter.

It is a meager freedom that leaves no scars

Blinding light. Perfect black. Ringing like a million mouths, screaming, singing. Body instantly and utterly gone. Gone the rain. Gone the mob. Gone her own mind and will. Gone everything but a single voice,

we use the time we have. There is no other.

dozens of groups of seven to sit on the dozens of trials that would take place, each group composed, as decreed by Terial himself, of the Seven: a mother, a merchant, a pauper, a prelate, a soldier, a son, and a dying man.

The process is the goal," Kaden responded innocently, trying not to feel smug. It was about time one of those Shin maxims worked in his favor.

Our lives were short, no more than a blink to the foes we fought, but we were fertile. Fathers fought our battles, but it was our mothers who won the war.

The idea ... seemed about as likely as a shark strolling out of the sea on its fins to ask for a bowl of soup.

I'm doubly sorry for your loss," the old monk began after a time. "First, because every son should have a chance to know his father, not as a child knows his protector, but as a man knows another man.

Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little - a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep - to unmake a man or woman. It's amazing, given everything's fragility, that we don't live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.

The fighters who frighten you are not the fighters to fear. The man you barely notice will be the one to bury a blade in your back.

among a soft folk obsessed with words, choosing the right word is nearly as important as doing the right thing." The

It was just as all the Kettral said: You went to Hook to escape your problems and came back with a dozen more.

Any fool can see what's there. You need to see what is not there.

Pain is suffering because we want to be free of it, and pleasure is suffering because we fear to lose it. Fools search for freedom, but there is no freedom. There is only the embrace.

The mind was a clay pot set out in the rain. A monk could empty it daily and still the old hopes and worries, the body's meager strengths and perennial pains pattered against the bottom, trickled down the sides, filling it once more.

There's no blade as keen as surprise.

Like waves, men and women exist only in motion, in change. Put them on the page, and you have already failed. And

Only a fool believes a thing of value will be laid in her lap with no reckoning.

I'd leave you here longer, but it's no longer safe.

Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage.
Silence is a hammer that shatters the walls of speech.
Stillness is strength; pain a soft bed.
Put down your basin; emptiness is the only vessel.

We all have our hobbies," Kaden replied. He could have been discussing farming techniques.

Gardening?" Kaden asked. "Why?"
The assassin looked amused. "We need to eat. The hot blood of the slaughtered is delicious, obviously, but sometimes the body craves vegetables.

Assume nothing,'" he said. The first chapter of the Tactics. "If we figure everyone might be a murderer, we're less likely to be disappointed.

This is what we are for, Alin," the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch's first name. She hadn't even known it herself. "Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there's no saying what the zealots will do to her."

"There's no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees," Birch pointed out. "We can't save her if we're dead."

"That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve."

"I thought service meant fighting," Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.

"Sometimes, Alin," Fulton replied, nodding. "And sometimes it means dying.

Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past."

"I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. "I've been short on prognosticating pigs."

"Life is perfect for a pig," Ruc said. "Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals... The fact that my head's still attached at my neck doesn't mean no one's sharpening a knife.

What I observe is that the world is ruled by men - good men and bad, desperate men and those with principles.

There's no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker

I'm losing the game, which means I have three choices: cede, fight back..." ...Kaden smiled, "Or break the board.

Henderson Jakes, the founder of the Eyrie, had envisioned a cadre of elite soldiers dedicated to celibacy, the empire, and the art of war. He had to settle for two out of three. Young men and women willing to leap off massive birds into burning buildings at a mere nod from a commanding officer grew violently rebellious when required to abstain from sex.

Leadership isn't just about giving orders. A fool can give orders. A leader listens. He changes his mind. He acknowledges mistakes.