Quotes from Glen Cook

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

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.

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

I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.

My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.

Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.

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.

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

Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony." The Black Company pg 447

Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.

Ah, the smell of mystery and dark doings, of skulduggery and revenge. The meat of a good tale.

I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

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.

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

Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.

I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward 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 that we are just plain nice folks.

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

You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.

No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.

Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.

In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.

Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The

Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.

I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.