Quotes from R. Scott Bakker

Ajencis," he continued, "once wrote that all men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves—they are the rulers of Men . . .

Why me? A selfish question. Perhaps the most selfish of questions. All burdens, even those as demented as the Apocalypse, must fall upon the shoulders of someone. Why not him?

All men are greater than dead men.

While waiting for the hidden machinery of messengers and secretaries to relay his request, Achamian wandered into an adjoining courtyard, struck by the other immensities that framed his present circumstance. Even if there were no Consult, no threat of the Second Apocalypse, he realized, nothing would be the same. Kellhus would change the world, not in the way of an Ajencis or a Triamis, but in the way of an Inri Sejenus. This, Achamian realized, was Year One. A new age of Men.

To be a teacher was to be a student anew, to relive the intoxication of insight, and to be a prophet, to sketch the world down to its very foundation—not simply to tease sight from blindness, but to demand that another see.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman's eyes.

He looked like a bored boy deciding whether to poke a dead fish.

But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we're nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.

Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance.

It seemed poison had been poured into wonder's own decanter.

This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seen like a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so? —AJENCIS, THE EPISTEMOLOGIES

The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man's mouth.

Suffer not a whore to live, for she maketh a pit of her womb.

Fools can be trusted precisely because they are fools. Their agendas rarely intersect with your own.

All power shits. All power sleeps . Strength must be aimed , and so are all things exposed, all things weak. To despise weakness is to loathe existence itself

The No-God was coming. Mog-Pharau walked, and the world thundered.

Vulgar languages, especially when native, stand too close to the press of life. Their meanings are too easily warped by our insights and experiences. The sheer otherness of Gilcûnya serves to insulate the semantics of sorcery from the inconstancies of our lives.

The genius of most men lay in finding reasons after their actions. The heart was ever self-serving, especially when the beliefs served involved sacrifice.

They worshipped themselves as the measure of all significance

The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter's razor.

Ignorance is trust. —

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.