Your – ah – intervention, shall we say, has simplified things in the palace enormously. We no longer have to worry about Salmissra’s whims and peculiar appetites. We rule by committee, and we hardly ever find it necessary to poison each other anymore. No one’s tried to poison me for months.
Does bouncing count? – Silk, The Belgariad.
If you can’t do something about a situation, there’s no point in worrying about it.
The men sit around getting fat and arguing with each other about something they call “philosophy” – most of which is pure nonsense.
I’ve seen hopeless wars won before. If you give in to despair before you begin, you’ll have no chance at all.
We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that’s taken a very long time.
Then you’ve learned something today. No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.
He’s nearly a man,” Faldor explained to Aunt Pol, “and a man always has need of a good knife.
He felt oddly powerless, as if his entire life were in the fingers of two faceless players maneuvering pieces in the same patterns on some vast board in a game that, for all he knew, had lasted for eternity.
His outburst that morning had been directed almost more at himself than at Aunt Pol. He had called her a monster, but it was the monster within himself he hated. The dreadful catalogue of what she had suffered over uncounted years for him and the passion with which she had spoken – evidence of the pain his words had caused her – twisted searingly in his mind. He was ashamed, so ashamed that he could not even bear to look into the faces of his friends.
Because they were both young, she was intolerant and he was stubborn.
It keeps him happy, Dahlaine, and happy people are nicer than gloomy ones. Haven’t you noticed that before?
As long as people are talking instead of fighting, nobody loses very much blood – unless he happens to bite his tongue.
We call this a “bow”, Cap’n, and the thing that’s sticking out of that fellow’s head over on the other side of the trench is called an “arrow”. If you put them together just right, they’ll do all sorts of nice things to people who aren’t nice.
You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.
That’s the nature of a fat man, Ce’Nedra.” He sighed. “The last meal is history. It’s the next one that’s important.
Watch out for snakes,’ Durnik called after him.
Raphael watched, and gradually he began to understand them. At first it was not even a theory, but rather a kind of intuition. He found that he could look at any one of them and almost smell the impending crisis. That was the key word – crisis. At first it seemed too dramatic a term to apply to situations resulting from their bumbling mismanagement of their lives or deliberate wrongheaded stupidity, but they themselves reacted as if these situations were in fact crises.
Mad with terror, many even leaped into the deadly water of the river. ‘We’re not going to be able to get through that mob, Polgara,’ Barak said.
It’s the way of kings.