Petrik > Books: masterpieces‎ (29)

“Tell our stories to the world, and never forget that we exist so long as someone remembers us.”

“You’d be surprised at how often one looks in the present or in the future for answers that are always in the past.”

“Nobody must know what I have explained here. Nobody must know the truth, because I’ve learned that in this world truth only hurts, and God loves and helps those who lie.”

“Sometimes, when the gods aren’t looking and destiny loses its way, even good people get a taste of good luck in their lives.”

“A painting is never finished. The trick is to know at what point to leave it unfinished.”

“Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them.
A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images, and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.
This is the golden rule that sustains every artifice of paper and ink. Because when the lights go out, when the music ends and the stalls are empty again, the only thing that matters is the mirage that has been engraved in the theater of the imagination all readers hold in their mind. This, and the hope every maker of tales carries within: that readers will open their hearts to these little creatures made of ink and paper, and give them a part of themselves so they can be immortal, even if only for a few minutes.”

“So, finally we come to the end of this series, and with it, the end of the Banished Land’s tales. Although Of Blood and Bone is a trilogy that can be read as a standalone series, it is also the final chapter of a longer history that involves the four books from The Faithful and the Fallen series. When read together they form around a one-hundred-and-fifty-year history of the Banished Lands, and a sizeable chunk of my life. Roughly seventeen years have flown by, I think, since lifting my pen and writing down my first ideas. I hope that you’ve enjoyed your time spent here, and that this book feels like a fitting and satisfying conclusion to all that has gone before.”

“That what we fight for is love and friendship. Not schemes and strategies, but people. Our kind, our friends. Our loved ones.”

“How have I come to be here, standing before a horde of snarling creatures who want to kill me? I don’t even like crowds.”

“We of the Order have sworn our oaths and sealed them in our blood, pledged ourselves to truth and courage. But you who have not said the words, I know that you are the same as us, in your hearts. Warriors, brothers and sisters bound to a cause. Otherwise you would not be here now, standing at ourside, risking your lives. This is the sharp edge of who we are. We will stand and fight, together. There is no retreat this time. We win or we die.”

“Truth and Courage. Those are the words that define a warrior of this Order. They are more than words; they are a way of life. Would you choose them? You will be swearing to a life of hardship, a life where you put aside your own pleasures and desires, and place yourself in danger’s way. Again, and again, and again.”

“Sometimes the only answer is blood and steel.”

“The defender of the innocent, protector of the weak. I will bring hope to the lost, give my life for the helpless... With truth as my shield... And Courage as my sword, I shall stand against the darkness.

“We are just people, all of us the same. Flawed, fragile, stubborn, angry, happy. And life treats no one differently. We are born, and we live, and then we die. It’s what we do while we are there that counts. And if we can be called friend, then we are lucky indeed.

“Good men are remembered with love by their friends… Great warriors are remembered with awe by their enemies.”

“When something has to be done, there’s always a way to do it.”

“Everything is a battle now… Every business, every town, every newspaper article or press conference or godsdamned vote in the Royal Council… There used to be a way things were done, under the eyes of Old Uncle. We used to be able to count on certain things. Now there aren’t any lines. Everyone in the clan is a part of the fight.”

“No matter which part of the country you’re from, which clan you swear allegiance to, whether you wear jade or not, we are all Kekonese. We defend and avenge our own. You wrong any of us, you wrong us all. You seek to war with us, and we will return it a hundredfold.”

“We don’t handle this world. We make it handle us.”

“It was Kaul Hilo’s great talent. He could have a single ordinary conversation with a man and make him loyal for life.”

“We’ve both hurt each other because we were both too stubborn about what we expected, and we paid badly for that. But what’s the point of life if we give up on the people we love?”

“We all make mistakes. Sometimes terrible mistakes we can barely live with. But we learn from them. And maybe… Maybe we can forgive each other.”

“Perhaps that was the great tragedy of jade warriors and their families. Even when we win, we suffer.”

“At times, when faced with difficult decisions, he would think back to the duel that had dramatically earned him his jade and reputation, and he would remind himself that sometimes the most obvious solution required only the willingness to take the most unreasonable of actions.”

“The mind cannot adjust quickly to a fundamental change in reality without breaking. If the moon vanished from the sky, people would not believe it; they would think it was a trick of light or clouds.”

“And here we are. So many good things have happened since then, and also so many terrible things that it’s hard to be afraid of anything anymore. Whatever’s going to happen will happen, so the most important thing is that we appreciate what we have and the people we care about.”

“I’ve never needed a sword to protect you—to raise you the way your father wanted. Caring for my family meant putting away the fighter, so I did.”

“But if I learned one thing from Firebird, it’s that a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.”

“There were times to lie low, to watch and wait, to play the long game. And then there were times when you needed to light the world on fire and watch it explode.”

“Gwenna Sharpe was hardly the most skilled among the Kettral. Her own wing included stronger fighters, more proficient archers, superior tacticians. What set Sharpe apart, what made her the Wing’s true commander, was her unconquerable heart.”

“A path unfolded slowly. If you followed a path too far in the wrong direction all you had to do was turn around, start walking back the other way. What had happened to her felt more like a breakage. The right force had been applied at the right time in the right way, and something inside her had snapped, something that could not be put back.”

“You are the unfolding, Gwenna. You are the change. You are whatever it is that, in the face of misery and bliss and bafflement, keeps going.”

‘“Every people has a story of their golden age. How it was different. Better. More noble. It’s funny how those golden ages are always in the past, always eclipsed by some more recent catastrophe. You think Dombang was better two hundred years ago, but go back two hundred years, and I promise you, the people then were just like us. They were angry, confused, afraid. And they thought that they’d already missed it, some golden age that took place two hundred years before them, or five hundred, or a thousand…” He turned from the stars to look at Ruc. “Instead of worshipping the past, I’d like to work on the present.”
“By murdering people.”
“Some people need murdering.”’

“When had that ever not been true? She was no historian, but you didn’t need to be in order to see that the chronicle of the world was a chronicle of things going wrong, of plague and famine, slaughter, rebellion, greed and cowardice, human misery wide as the sea.”

“Pain is a gift… It keeps the weary soldiers awake. It reminds the irresolute warrior that there is work still to finish. It whispers in the ear of all who feel it something they might otherwise forget: You are not dead.”

“You couldn’t think about it, all the world’s suffering, or it would choke you. If you stopped to ponder all that misery, you’d never start moving again.”

“Life is an unwinnable fight, Gwenna Sharpe. If ends are all that matter, then we are all fools and failures.”

“He stared over the expanse and then closed his eyes, feeling the soft breeze against his face and the gentle silence of the night. These quiet moments were too rare, and went unappreciated too often. How long had it been since he had just stopped and breathed? The past year had been a blur of pressing forward, of learning and planning and obsessing over all the different things he could try, going through every potential strategy and how likely it was to succeed or fail. In all that time, it hadn’t felt like he had once just…paused.”

“Faithful people suffer and evil people prosper all the time, Davian—you must know that is true. Besides, if our actions are driven only by reward or punishment—eternal or otherwise—then they are motivated by greed and selfishness, not faith or love. That is where so many people go wrong, even those who say they believe in El. They obey because they think it will make their lives better, rather than themselves. And that is very much the wrong reason.”

“I don’t doubt His existence, but how could I continue to love, worship, even just accept a god whose plan involved something so precious to me being ripped away?”

“It is not enough to fight for the right side. You have to figure out how to fight the right way, too. If winning is truly all that matters, then we’ve lost sight of what’s actually right and wrong in the first place.”

“What is the point of gathering knowledge if one does not pass it on? What is the point of growing old if one does not try to shape the future?”

“Sometimes, the only way to improve something is to destroy it, so it can be rebuilt better… Sometimes, to change the world, we must first burn it down.”

“How could one man keep his oath when everyone else was breaking theirs, after all? An army very much relied on unity of purpose.”

“Have you been outside lately? Wisdom is not at a premium, madness is the fashion, the balance sheets are all torn up and the friends that were assets have become liabilities… Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening.”

“The past has never interested me. For better or worse it is done, and set, and littered with disappointments as a battlefield is littered with the dead. But the future is a ploughed field, full of potential. The future we can twist into wonderful shapes.”

“It’s a comfort, telling yourself there’s some big right thing out there. That you could seek some wise old bastard in the mountains who’s got the answer. Then there’d be no need for doubts and regrets… But far as I can tell it ain’t that simple. Right things, wrong things, well… it’s all a matter of where you stand. Every choice is good for some, bad for others. And once you’re chief, you can’t just do what’s good for you, or those you love. You have to find what’s best for most. Worst for fewest.”

“The sad truth is, men love to follow a man other man fear… Makes them feel fearsome, too. We tell the odd fond story of the good men. The straight edges. Your Rudd Threetrees, your Dogmen. But it’s the butchers men love to sing of. The burners and the blood-spillers. Your Cracknut Whirruns and your Black Dows. Your Bloody-Nines. Men don’t dream of doing the right thing, but of ripping what they want from the world with their strength and their will.”

“History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man’s right and another’s. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”

“Don’t matter how savage a face you show the world, few men dare look the Great Leveller in the eye once he comes calling.”

“Great folk are great ‘cause they plant new footsteps. Not ‘cause they blunder through the same mistakes some other bastards made.”

“Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.”

“Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.”

“It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.”

“The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them.”

“People are born selfish; babies are the most selfish creatures, even though they’re helpless and wouldn’t survive a day on their own. Growing up and losing that selfishness—that’s what civilization is, that’s what sets us above beasts. If someone harms my brother, they harm me—that’s what our clan oaths are about. Those men weren’t your enemies—they were our enemies.”

“The clan was not just people and jade and money. It was an idea, a legacy that connected the pats with the present and the future. The family’s strength was a promise.”

“If you’re not sure you’re in love, then you’re not.”

“Out of small resentments, spring great wars.”

“All that mortals could do was accept the lot they were given, and yet still fight to better their own fate and that of their loved ones.”

"I have enjoyed our long conversation. What's three and a half million words between friends?" – Steven Erikson

“It is not enough to wish for a better world for the children. It is not enough to shield them with ease and comfort. …if we do not sacrifice our own ease, our own comfort, to make the future's world a better one, then we curse our own children. We leave them a misery they do not deserve; we leave them a host of lessons unearned.”

“And now the page before us blurs.
An age is done. The book must close.
We are abandoned to history.
Raise high one more time the tattered standard
Of the Fallen. See through the drifting smoke
To the dark stains upon the fabric.
This is the blood of our lives, this is the
Payment of our deeds, all soon to be
Forgotten.
We were never what people could be.
We were only what we were.

Remember us.”

“All those bickering worshippers, each one convinced their version is the right one. Imagine getting prayers from ten million believers, not one of them believing the same thing as the one kneeling beside him or her. Imagine all those Holy Books, not one of them agreeing on anything, yet all of them purporting to be the word of that one god. Imagine two armies annihilating each other, both in that god's name. Who wouldn't be driven mad by that?”

“Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering.
Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them.
Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.”

“The sun, rising to meet its own child.”

“And perhaps that is the final, most devastating truth. The gods care nothing for ascetic impositions on mortal behaviour. Care nothing for rules of conduct, for the twisted morals of temple priests and monks. Perhaps indeed they laugh at the chains we wrap around ourselves – our endless, insatiable need to find flaws within the demands of life. Or perhaps they do not laugh, but rage at us. Perhaps our denial of life’s celebration is our greatest insult to those whom we worship and serve.”

“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the world. It must be given freely. In abundance.”

”The heart of wisdom is tolerance.”

“The harder the world, the fiercer the honor.”

“Never do what you can’t undo until you’ve considered well what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”

“Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end.”

“This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together.”