"Death was kind. He drew a sharp breath. 'But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child."

"I'm a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery."

"There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it."

"Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak."

"It doesn't pay to trust a lettered man in the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other man's ideas."

"Men who've made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they've chosen to follow."

"There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in us, deeper than our blood."

"Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces."

"Truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield."

"We're built of contradictions, all of us. It's those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I'll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off."

"You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps."

"The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that's too heavy to carry."

"The enemy of my enemy may be my friend of course the friend of my friend is often a jerk."

"Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave, as only those who've already lost can be."

"I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood."

"All the best secrets are told at night."

"Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed."

"Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It's not until you've seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren't ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it's not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you're a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again."

"There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone."

"Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go."

"I've been known to be contrary. When something pushes me, I shove back. Even if the one doing the pushing is me. It would have been easy to gut him then and there. Satisfying. But the need was too urgent. I felt pushed."

"Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.' Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. 'In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.''Pride is all I have."

"I've never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy."

"And an edge that could cut a truth from a lie."

"Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you."

"To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I'm only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I'm going to err towards beating you with this stick."

"Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise."

"I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment."

"Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!"

"I've never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them."

"Men who are certain of everything - well perhaps they are not men at all."

"Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name- Baraqel. I didn't like him much."

"Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing."

"It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from."

"It's often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself."

"A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don't let fear turn possibility into certainty."

"I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that'd make you want to hurl."

"We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars."

"No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash."

"Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with 'looking good a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food."

"Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw."

"As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment."

"Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me."

"What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise."

"War, my friends, is a thing of beauty."

"Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?"

"I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It's in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made."

"A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that's gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change."

"Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained."

"We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I'm well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on."