Glen Cook quotes

Time is the enemy whose patience can't be exhausted. (Glen Cook)
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing. View quote
Glen Cook
Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why. View quote
Glen Cook
Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day. View quote
Glen Cook
The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get. View quote
Glen Cook
Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent. View quote
Glen Cook
Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind. View quote
Glen Cook
There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. View quote
Glen Cook
More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way. View quote
Glen Cook
Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true. View quote
Glen Cook
My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer. (Glen Cook)
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny. View quote
Glen Cook
I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another. View quote
Glen Cook
There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them. View quote
Glen Cook
. . .and the thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you. View quote
Glen Cook
Evil is relative, Annalist. You can't hang a sign on it. You can't touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger. View quote
Glen Cook
Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey. View quote
Glen Cook
I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different. View quote
Glen Cook
I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks. View quote
Glen Cook
Being an old cynic myself I have strong notions about the true value of human gratitude. It is a currency whose worth plunges by the hour. View quote
Glen Cook
I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present. (Glen Cook)
Only this time it was just a brief rest, till the stars came out. They stared down with mockery in their twinkles, saying all our sweat and blood really had no meaning in the long eye of time. Nothing we did would be recalled a thousand years from now. Such thoughts infected us all. No one had any ideals or glory-lust left. We just wanted to get somewhere, lie down, and forget the war. The war would not forget us. View quote
Glen Cook
I heard Mather's blather but it did not register as sense. I uttered, "Tooga ain't no crazier than any other religion around here.” That seemed to offend everyone equally. Good. View quote
Glen Cook
Man, woman and child, the people of Shadowcatch were privy to the one true secret of the universe: there is always a darker shadow lurking beyond the one whose face you can see. View quote
Glen Cook
Though it might wear a thousand different names in a thousand different times, and might come from a thousand different directions, darkness always comes. View quote
Glen Cook