I’m going to adopt you. You’d make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?” Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, “I think she’s right.” “Excellent! Let’s go ask your wicked future mother’s opinion.” We.
Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then.
Bragging is how criminals get caught and men with deep secrets deliver themselves to their enemies. It’s bonehead human nature. We all want to look special. Knowing something is one of the best ways.
Part of winning is a downdeep certainty that, no matter how bad things look, a road to victory will open.
He surveyed his audience with that look of sublime solemnity only a drunk can muster.
A man lay before me. He had sunk as low as any I had ever known. Then he had fought his way back and back and had become worthy. A man far better than I, for he had located his moral pole star and set his course by it though it had cost his life.
Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.
No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.
A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.
Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.
One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid. Death is the only exorcism.
Let’s say the madonnas of the night in Elm were severely disappointed in the Black Company.
When I reflect on my companions’ inner natures I usually wish I controlled one small talent. I wish I could look inside them and unmask the darks and brights that move them. Then I take a quick look into the jungle of my own soul and thank heaven that I cannot. Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.
I snuck a glance at her. She wore a teasing little smile. I shifted my attention to the fighting. What she did to me, just sitting there, amidst the fury of the end of the world, was more frightening than the prospect of a death in battle. I am too old to boil like a horny fifteen-year-old.
None of us are going to get out of this alive so we might as well grab a laugh while we can.
I am a haunted man. I am haunted by the Limper’s screams. I am haunted by the Lady’s laughter. I am haunted by my suspicion that we are furthering the cause of something that deserves to be scrubbed from the face of the earth. I am haunted by the conviction that those bent upon the Lady’s eradication are little better than she. I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.
I am a haunted man. I am haunted by the Limper’s screams. I am haunted by the Lady’s laughter.
We gathered our things and began taking leave of camp followers who had trickled out from the city. Our animals and equipment would be their reward for faith and friendship. I spent a sad, gentle hour with a woman to whom I meant more than I suspected. We shed no tears and told one another no lies. I left her with memories and most of my pathetic fortune. She left me with a lump in my throat and a sense of loss not wholly fathomable.
My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion.
But maybe there is a force for greater good, created by our unconscious minds conjoined, that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts.