Glen Cook

"Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day."

Glen Cook

"Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent."

Glen Cook

"Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why."

Glen Cook

"Might may not make right, but it makes victory."

Glen Cook

"No captive was smart enough to speak a language any of us knew. Talking loud or slow did not help."

Glen Cook

"Literacy is sorcery itself in the hinterland."

Glen Cook

"I do hope that karma is the keystone of the universe—even if I have to come back as a banana slug myself."

Glen Cook

"My apprentices were exasperating. They were competing to see who was laziest."

Glen Cook

"There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight."

Glen Cook

"Fools can make an omen of anything in retrospect."

Glen Cook

"I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask."

Glen Cook

"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."

Glen Cook

"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?"

Glen Cook

"“We all do that. In every day life it’s called making excuses.” True, raw motives are too rough to swallow. By the time most people reach my age, they have glossed their motives so often and so well they fall completely out of touch with them."

Glen Cook

"I grinned. “The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.”"

Glen Cook

"The list of cities lost was long and disheartening, even granting exaggeration by the reporters. Soldiers defeated always overestimate the strength of their foe. That soothes egos suspecting their own inferiority."

Glen Cook

"I could not get my feelings straight. I did not believe in evil as an active force, only as a matter of viewpoint, yet I had seen enough to make me question my philosophy. If the Lady were not evil incarnate, then she was as close as made no difference."

Glen Cook

"It was a day ripped full-grown from the womb of despair."

Glen Cook

"The essence of sorcery, even for its nonfraudulent practitioners, is misdirection."

Glen Cook

"How to argue with sociopathic reasoning? Lisa was the heart of Lisa’s universe. Other people existed only to be exploited."

Glen Cook

"My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion."

Glen Cook

"I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my tenure as Annalist. 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."

Glen Cook

"Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."

Glen Cook

"Nobody knew what the Company wanted. Various witnesses assigned motives according to their own fears. Few came anywhere near the mark."

Glen Cook

"Simple minds respond to simple answers."

Glen Cook