Glen Cook - The Black Company (1984)

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

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
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
Evil is relative, Annalist. 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.

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
He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping.

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

Glen Cook
Fools can make an omen of anything in retrospect.

Glen Cook
I am not religious. I cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity's frothy carryings-on. I mean, logically, beings of that order just wouldn't. But maybe there is a force for greater good, created by our unconscious minds conjoined, that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe, being a mindthing, it is not time-bound. Maybe it can see everywhere and everywhen and move pawns so that what seems to be today's victory becomes the cornerstone of tomorrow's defeat.
Maybe weariness did things to my mind.

Glen Cook
Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.

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
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
Only this time it was just a brief rest, till the stars came out. They stared down with mockery in their twinkles, saying all our sweat and blood really had no meaning in the long eye of time. Nothing we did would be recalled a thousand years from now.
Such thoughts infected us all. No one had any ideals or glory-lust left. We just wanted to get somewhere, lie down, and forget the war.
The war would not forget us.

Glen Cook
Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

Glen Cook
Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.

Glen Cook
There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

Glen Cook
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.

Glen Cook
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.

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

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

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

Glen Cook
I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled towards absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks.

Glen Cook
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.

Glen Cook