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...

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

Tell me, tutor,’ I said. ‘Is revenge a science, or an art?

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.

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

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.’ He held out his hand, palm open. ‘Free will has to be taken,’ I said.

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

When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin,...

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...

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.

Brother Maical’s wisdom lies in knowing he is not clever and letting himself be led. The foolishness of mankind is that we do not do the same.

is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.

Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn’t want to find myself impaled on it.

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.

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...

We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

Do you know why the leaves change colour, Makin?” They did look spectacular. The forest had grown around us as we traveled and the canopy burned with colour, from deepest red to flame orange, an...

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else’s blood on his shirt. You could trust...

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

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for...

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you...

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...

Sometimes our worst fears aren’t realized – though in my experience it’s only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.

For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered...

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.

He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter’s eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose...

Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.

Gomst’s mouth framed a ‘no’, but every other muscle in him said ‘yes’. You’d think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all.

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...

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

When they killed him, Mother wouldn’t hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I’ve...

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.

It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh

It’s an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

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...

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.

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

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.