Quotes from R. Scott Bakker

Helplessness. If women were hope´s oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exerciced dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men.

I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.

We," she repeated, laughing as though both hurt and astounded. "It really is 'we' now, isn't it?" With a shy, even scared, smile, she helped him pull free his weathered robes. "When I can't find you," he said, "or even when you turn away, I feel … I feel hollow, as though my heart's a thing of smoke … Isn't that 'we'?

There's faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there's faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they're not entirely certain they're in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God's mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .

To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.

He saw clearly now why he so loved this species of war. On the field of battle, his every act was open to the scrutiny of others. Here, however, he stood outside scrutiny, enacted destiny from a place that transcended judgement or recrimination. He lay hidden in the womb of events. Like a God.

He said ... A pause. He cleared his throat. He said that pity was the only love I could hope for. He saw her swallow, blink. Oh, Akka ... Of all the world, only she truly understood. Of all the world.

a strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.

Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?

This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late. —

Where hopes burn bright," he said, "patience is quickly consumed.

Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly -- only varieties of sorrow.

Gone were the antique rivalries, the mortal hatred that had so often set them against each other. Gone were the differences. And it seemed a thing of mad and tragic folly that Men might raise arms against Men, when creatures so vile so infested the world.

Gods are but greater demons, the Cishaurim said, hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?

But I've always believed," Kellhus continued, "that one must ride another man's horse for a day before criticizing." "To better understand him?" "No," the man replied with an eye-twinkling shrug. "Because then you're a day away and you have his horse . . ." Achamian

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease.

To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife. —SCYLVENDI

The eyes of men were but pinholes...All their books, even their scriptures, were nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn't see what was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused pinpricks with the sky.

For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another's soul?

A lifetime of cannibal hatred

Conceit does not sit well with martyrdom.

when the world denies us over and over, when it punishes us as it's punished you, Serwë, it becomes difficult to understand the meaning. All our pleas go unanswered. Our every trust is betrayed. Our hopes are all crushed. It seems we mean nothing to the world. And when we think we mean nothing, we begin to think we are nothing.

Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery? Perhaps

Above all the mighty detest change.