K.J. Parker Quotes

I know she comes across as annoying to begin with," he said. "But once you've got to know her a bit better, you'll find it makes no difference whatsoever.

Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.

The public," he said, "bless them. It's the same in tailoring: they always think they know more about your job than you do, and then you get the blame when it ends up looking a mess." He

Being, in my own small way, a part of Authority, it never ceases to amaze me how much people believe in it and trust it. I see it from the inside, of course - inefficiencies, stupidities, corruption, bloody-minded ignorance and simple lack of resources to cope with the magnitude of the endless, ever-multiplying problems. But other people see it from the outside. They see the Land Walls. They see the emperor's head on the coins, with Victory on the reverse. They see the temples. They see soldiers in shining armour. They see, and they believe, that the empire is big, strong, wise, unbeatable.

The world is full of annoyances, none more infuriating than a fool with a valid point.

Faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.

I gather you play chess, he'd said, and she'd given him a look, later he'd ralised it was fair warning; yes, she played chess. The had a mignificent coral and ivory set, worth a thousand acres of good arable land. He'd made soft opening, the way you do when you're playing a girl, and suddenly he found himself staring defeat in the facs - he'd never los a game except three times, to Senza.

When you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it.

Ah well." Gignomai turned slowly round. "It's not often commented on, but when you stop and think, mercy is the biggest injustice of them all.

The idea is to make the space around you into a zone where nothing mortal can survive.

Great art, I've always felt, is like a pearl; thousands of layers of creativity and sensibility built up around an inner core of money.

I've always had this theory, that we're all born with a certain optimum age, the age we're really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I've always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.

Everyone keeps telling me what I can't do, but they're wrong. The only thing I can't do is nothing.

Ah well. He'd beaten her twice sind then: once on their honeymoon, though he still suspected her of throwing the game, and once on the day she lost the baby. And two out of eight hundred and six wasn't too bad, against such an opponent.

And lies, of course - It's like astronomy, I always say. Clever fellows, the astronomers, they can tell ever such a lot about something they can't see by the shadow it casts over something they can. Same with lies. The shape of a lie will often give you the truth.

He took a couple of steps. "I clink," he said. "It's undignified."
"Everybody clinks. It's what soldiers do.

If there's a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?

He couldn't even write his name. When he was Emperor, he had to sign documents with a stencil.

But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth.

I have my faults. But when I hear bad news that's palpably true, I don't argue or ask for proof.

Witnesses are, of course, ambivalent; some of them need record what would otherwise be lost and go to waste, while others need to hunted down and killed before they cant tell what they know; and the man who stands on the grave of the last witness own the truth and is responsible for it, a dangerous trustee.

Of course, I never beat Ogus at anything, unless I cheated. Which I did, whenever I could. I figure, winning is winning. Cheating is just one of many ways of prevailing; just happens to be the way I'm best at.

A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it's not the work they're supposed to be doing.

He looked at me the way the male spider gazes at his beloved. He knows he's going to get eaten afterwards, but it'll be worth it. "Deal," he said.

I don't believe in gods, only in religion.

It was as though the Gods had dropped something - a comb, a hairpin, a needle - and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us - Excuse me. It was an impressive sight.

When you get to my age, you'll find it's fatally easy to forget to hate all your enemies all the time; and once you've slipped up and not hated one of them, it makes it almost impossibly hard to hate the rest of them.

The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most - people who know me, who believe what i tell them - is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them.
I can persuade people of things I don't believe myself,or (more usually) simply don't care about

It's about keeping the peace, said Rasso from the livery. His choice of words made Marzo want to smile. Rasso had borrowed the phrase from him and, like any man in the colony who borrowed anything, he seemed determined to use it till it fell apart before he was called on to give it back.

I rarely ask for suggestions, because, when I do, people tend to make them.

After all, what is truth but the consensus of memories of reliable witnesses?

If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?

He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid.

Ah". Tzimisces smiled. "Let me guess. Flowery periphrases, back-to-back literary allusions and quotations from thousand-year-old authors. A marked reluctance to use one word when twelve can be jammed in if you sit on the lid.

I mention this because that's how the world changes. It's either so quick that we never know what hit us, or so gradual that we don't notice.

It`s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do because it`s expected of them, or they think it`s expected of them.

It'd have been so nice if my life had been a well-controlled experiment. You know; start off with your basic ingredients, add education, experiences, events, stirring with a glass rod, when appropriate retarding the reaction with a block of ice. Predictable consequences, intended results, and something worth having at the end. Hasn't quite worked out like that. As for the result, the product, we'll have to wait and see. I may yet surprise myself.

I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn't work if you push it.

Obviously, there's no way of making money that doesn't hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn't generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn't function if that were the case.

For what it was worth, she got the impression that Niessa liked her, or at least approved of her, in the same way a chess-player approves of one of his pieces when it stays where it's been put and doesn't go wandering off all over the board.

His mother collected medicines, rather in the way a boy collects coins or seals or arrowheads; one or two genuine pieces, along with a whole load of junk.

I like to let them talk things out, but fact isn't a democratic process; if a thing isn't true it isn't true, even if everybody votes that it is.

In politics, it's what isn't said that matters.

It's the way my mind works, when it works at all. Things to do today: settle down, achieve serenity, live happily ever after. Tick the box and move on.

I figure a friend has the right to offend you at least once.

No disrespect to the fire god, naturally; blame it instead on His administration, presumably made up of officers of roughly the same level of ability as their terrestial counterparts. That would explain why the mild storm she'd ordered for Oida hit her instead.

Phrantzes considered for a moment, collecting his thoughts like a general rallying his surviving troops after a massacre.

I'd finally given her what she wanted,
the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the
catalyst of change) through the agency of death.

Hope, though; now there's a real pest. Hope doesn't just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there's a nice job in your brother-in-law's tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there's no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you're miserable and in pain, but Hope won't let you go. She's a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I've made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there's nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.

Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn't go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn't going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy'll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn't really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a f

All his life he'd dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he'd long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he'd been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what's left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail
but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?

We can't let him win. Even if it takes fifty years, or a hundred. You can't let the bad guys win. It's not acceptable."

For Hodda, life is drama. It falls into a set number of clearly defined categories: tragedy, comedy, romance, burlesque, farce. If it's a comedy, the good guys win and everybody gets married. If it's a tragedy, the good guys win but everybody dies. But you can't let the bad guys win. Nobody's going to pay to see that.

Me, I don't care about the bad guys, so long as they keep the hell away from me. When they get too close, in my face, I tell lies and run away. That means I'll never be a hero, but I don't mind that. I do character parts and impersonations.