Quotes from K.J. Parker

Simply because something is factually wrong doesn't make it untrue.

He looked at me the way the male spider gazes at his beloved. He knows he's going to get eaten afterwards, but it'll be worth it. "Deal," he said.

My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I'm not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn't carry on the way it's been so far.

It was as though the Gods had dropped something—a comb, a hairpin, a needle—and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us— Excuse me. It was an impressive sight.

It's like—all right, supposing there's a fire. What do you do? You grab everyone and everything you can and you get the hell out of there. You don't agonise about letting the fire win. Staying alive doesn't make you the fire's accomplice.

My guess is, they couldn't sleep, and they had the kind of generous nature that reckons insomnia isn't something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.

Bir ?eyi yapman?n en çabuk, en kolay ve en ucuz yolu ilk seferinde düzgün yapmakt?r.

Aidi nodded. "Lying to yourself's always a problem," he said.

I don't believe in gods, only in religion.

Great art, I've always felt, is like a pearl; thousands of layers of creativity and sensibility built up around an inner core of money.

The truth, I've found, is like an annoying little dog that takes a fancy to you in the street and follows you home, barking. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been glad to be confronted with the truth.

There's nothing quite like the scriptures for killing faith stone dead. Actually reading them and thinking about what they said evaporated my belief like spit on a hot stove.

The public," he said, "bless them. It's the same in tailoring: they always think they know more about your job than you do, and then you get the blame when it ends up looking a mess." He

One of these days I'd really like to win a battle, rather than just stand quiet while they lose it at me. You know, just to be able say I'd done it. But I'm not complaining. I mean, it works.

But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns.

Why are there never eighty soldiers around when you need them?

He took a couple of steps. "I clink," he said. "It's undignified." "Everybody clinks. It's what soldiers do.

There was once a king in a far-off land who said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

He had proved beyond any reasonable doubt that gods and devils were simply myth and superstition, but deep in his unruly peasant heart ("My father was a village apothecary and my mother was a goatherd's daughter. Can you imagine?") he believed...And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can't do anything about. You can't make it come if you want it, and you can't make it go if you don't.

We hold that you can't own anything that four strong men can't lift.

fact isn't a democratic process; if a thing isn't true it isn't true, even if everybody votes that it is.

They've heard of sequential numbering in Supply but clearly aren't convinced that it'd work, so Block 374 is wedged in between Blocks 217 and 434.

I take the view that we're the sum of everything that happens to us, good and bad. It's an alchemist's interpretation, of course, seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even if, particularly if, it's unstable or noxious, you get a different result.

I've always had this theory, that we're all born with a certain optimum age, the age we're really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I've always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.