Glen Cook Quotes

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

Evil is relative ... You can't hang a sign on it. You can't touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.

Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.

Pull up a step, Ace," I told him. He did, but he had the fidgets. He kept looking for his lucky exit. I told him, "I didn't really want you. But I can't get ahold of Winger." Not that I'd tried. "What? Who?" "Your girlfriend. Big blond goof with no common sense, always has an angle, never tells the truth if a lie will do. Her." "Part of that fits everybody in this thing," Morley said. "Even up on the Hill, they turned the truth to quicksilver." "Untruths, too." "Quicksilver lies. I like that." "Deadly quicksilver lies." I spotted friend C.J. Carlyle. "Look who missed the slaughter at Maggie Jenn's place.

I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true.

Maybe. We're all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!

No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.

Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.

What did we do today to frighten the world?

I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams.

The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

Its front sags against its neighbor to the right, clinging for support like one of its own drunken patrons.

You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.

The Hanged Man stopped gesturing and struck a pose: man listening.

Let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent.

An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. "I am a soldier." I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy's own Dejagoran dialect. "I've been distracted before. I'm still alive.

I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.

Okay, Croaker. What the hell happened?"
"I don't know. The falling sickness?"
"Give him some of his own soup," somebody suggested. "Serve him right." A tin cup appeared. We forced its contents down his throat.
His eye clicked open. "What are you trying to do? Poison me? Feh! What was that? Boiled sewage?"
"Your soup," I told him.

The Lady was medicine bad enough. The Dominator, though, was the body of which her evil was but a shadow. Or so the legend goes. I sometimes wonder why, if that is true, she walks the earth and he lies restless in the grave.

One-Eye scowled at Goblin. "Keep it up, Barf Bag. You'll be grocery shopping with the turtles." What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us. Grinning, One-Eye resumed gabbling with his relatives.

I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.

If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right ... all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance.

We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

Singe stopped. "You are quite right about Medford Shale, Garrett." Great-uncle Medford had figured prominently in the case where I'd first made Singe's acquaintance. "Just as you were right about me needing no distractions if I am to follow this trail. Perhaps I can have Doris knock you out, then have Marsha knock Doris out, then pray that a building collapses on Marsha." "Or we could all take a hint and save the chatter till later." "You could do that. But I am willing to bet that none of you are able." Was it Mama Garrett's boy who'd said that this ratgirl desperately needed some self-confidence? She sure didn't lack for it in this crowd.

The price of order," I muttered. I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn't budge.
"The cost of chaos," Tom-Tom countered. Thump on his drum. "Not quite the same thing, Croaker.

In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.

In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.

Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The

You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.

Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.

A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse.

I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.

I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.

No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.

Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.

If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possibly remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.

Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.

The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.

Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.

Best way out," Elmo observed laconically, "would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords."
"Sounds a little extreme," Goblin opined. "But if you want to go first, I'm right behind you.

A herd of minuscule lightning bugs poured out of One-Eye's nostrils. Good soldiers all, they fell into formation, spelling out the words Goblin is a Poof.

The only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions.

We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair.

I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.

Back to the company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to the annals. Back to fear.

She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

A man lay before me. He had sunk as low as any I had ever known. Then he had fought his way back and back and had become worthy. A man far better than I, for he had located his moral pole star and set his course by it though it had cost his life.

- Goblin, that was a dumb stunt.
- It sure was. Made me feel forty years younger.

The Dead Man once told me that monsters aren't born, they're made. That they are memorials which take years of cruelty to sculpt. And that while we should weep for the tortured child who served as raw material, we should permit no sentiment to impede us while we rid the world of the terror strewn by the finished work. It took me a while to figure out what he meant but I do understand him now.

This is a favorite game, matching wits with a Raker. He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another.

It was one of those moments in which I become very uncomfortable. One of those times when nothing you say can be right, and almost anything you do say is wrong. I could see no answer but the classic Croaker approach.
I began to back away.
That is how I handle my women. Duck for cover when they get distressed.
I almost made it to the door.
She could move when she wanted. She crossed the gap and put her arms around me, rested a cheek against my chest.
And that is how they handle me, the sentimental fool. The closet romantic.

She is the darkness.

Ah, the smell of mystery and dark doings, of skulduggery and revenge. The meat of a good tale.

You will find, as you mature, that most people are weak. And lazy. Weak, lazy people whine and complain. Otherwise, they would have to take a risk to make things right. And the wrong they suffer often don't need righting because they exist only inside their minds.

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony. The Black Company pg 447

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.
Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.
As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.

A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.

Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?

-'Did I snore again last night?'
-'You solidified your grasp on the all-time women's championship. You're ready to compete at the next level.

Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

The age is sorrowfully short of characters of the magnificently villainous vitality of those the Dominator took in olden times: Soulcatcher, the Hanged Man, Nightcrawler, Shapeshifter, the Limper, and such. Those were nastymen of the grand scope, nearly as wild and hairy in their wickedness as the Lady and Dominator themselves.

Truth is a deadly weapon, Lady said.