It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.
What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?
People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.
Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.
Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.
If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.
Humanity’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.
Ponder just let it happen. It’s because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.
All he knew was that you couldn’t hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that’d make the world, in a small way, a better place. Like shooting someone.
But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror’s defeat.
I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.
That’s what I don’t like about magic. It does everything by magic.
Shoes, men, coffins; never accept the first one you see.
Every step is a first step if it’s a step in the right direction.
Granny Weatherwaz was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.
Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.
Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village-the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.