Quotes About Sacrifice

I, Sergeant Gesler of the 5th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear by the two Lords of Summer, Fener and Treach, that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion – even though I know there's something about it I'm not seeing and I'm about to lose my life's savings on the Sergeants' Wager.

Dying a dozen times in mock battle is nothing. When it's for real you die but once.

He knew which world he wanted to live in. But, people didn't have that choice, did they? Not unless they killed the spark inside themselves first. With drink, with the oblivion of sweet smoke, but those were false dreams and made mockery of the ones truly lost – the ones whose lives had passed.

Cuttle smiled, and then he whispered to them in his mind, You should have seen our last stands. They were something. They were something. Darkness, and then brightness – brightness like a summer day without end. He went there, without a single look back.

There were loves in the world that never found voice. There were secrets never unveiled, and what would have been the point of that? She was no languid beauty. She was no genius wit. Courage failed her again and again, but not this time, as she drew sharp blades lengthways up her wrists, at precise angles, and watched as life flowed away. In Irilta's mind, this last gesture was but a formality.

This is the last day of the Khundryl Burned Tears. My children, do you ride with me? I know you do. My children, be brave this day. See your father, and know that he is proud of you all.

Is there a difference between spilled blood and blood squeezed out slowly, excruciatingly, over the course of a foreshortened lifetime of stress, misery, anguish and despair – all in the name of some amorphous god that no-one dares call holy? Even as they bend knee and repeat the litany of sacred duty?

To carry a child is to age in one's bones. To weary one's blood. To stretch skin and flesh. Birthing splits a woman in two, the division a thing of raw agony. Splitting young from old. And the child needs, and the mother gives.

the boy walks another soldier, another one bright heart not yet cooled to hard iron

What is given away for free comes back wounded.

She wept for the man she had abandoned, fleeing the pain she had seen in his eyes, as his love for her kept him stumbling in her wake, matching each footfall yet unable to come any closer. For that she could not allow. The intricate patterns on a hooded snake held mesmerizing charms, but the bite was no less deadly for that. She was the same. There was nothing in her – nothing that she could see – worth the overwhelming gift of love. Nothing in her worthy of him.

You'll do right, soldier, because you don't know how to do anything else. Doing right, soldier, is the only thing you're good at.' And if it hurts? 'Too bad. Stop your bitching, Fid. Besides, you ain't as alone as you think you are.

good men, the ones you lost.

Us soldiers only got one kind of coin worth anything, and it's called respect. And we hoard it, we hide it away, and there ain't nobody who'd call us generous. Easy spenders we're not. But there's something feels even worse than having to give up a coin – it's when somebody steps up and tosses one back at us.

It's what being a soldier is all about. That is what I have seen since we found them. You do not choose your family, and sometimes there's trouble in that family, but you don't choose.' 'But they did. They chose to be soldiers.' 'And then they come face to face with death, Saddic. That is the blood tie, and it makes a knot not even dying can cut.

The named soldier – dead, melted wax – demands a response among the living . . . a response no-one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous – as if cursed – while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?

Gruntle says worship is nothing more than the surrender to things beyond our control. He says the comfort from that is false, because there is nothing comfortable in the struggle to live.

To rule is to kneel before expediency.

First in , Last out. Motto of the bridgeburners

He's been asleep since the war began. He knows this now. In defending himself from death he lost his grip on life. He thinks of Emina, risking her life to deliver expired pills to someone she's never met. Of the young man who ran into the street to save her when she was shot. Of the cellist who plays for those killed in a mortar attack. He could run now, but he doesn't.

A hungry man thinks only about how he can feed his family today. He doesn't care that how he feeds them today destroys his children's tomorrow.

Souls must be converted here, and if there be not many born to Christ, may the Lord grant to me that I may sleep in the tomb and be heard of no more. Better indeed for us to die than to live, if souls be not saved.

It was not for the entire world that Christ made atonement, for if He had, all the world would be saved.

The greatest display of humility that the world has ever witnessed was the incarnation of Christ, which led ultimately to his crucifixion.