Assassin's Quest Quotes

Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.

I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.

There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won't. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can't eat meat until you've killed it.

Sometimes a man doesn't know how badly he's hurt until someone else probes the wound.

But a living is not a life.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

You are confusing plumbing and love again.

...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.

That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.

If a minstrel must embroider the truth to help us recall it fully, then let her, and let no one say she has lied. Truth is often much larger than facts.

Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning.

I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.

Fishing and ear scratching. The two reasons men were given hands.

...To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.

Useless to worry until we find ourselves blocked. ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.

One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.

I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.

I accepted their ridicule by sulking manfully.

Somewhere inside me, a madman raged in his cell, but I chose not to know of that.

Honour and courtesy and justice...they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them to us like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.

I will get your some clothes, a sword, and your very own assassin to join you on your quest." "Ooh, just what I've always wanted. A man whose job title had the word ass in it not once, but two times.

Six Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town Climbed a hill, and never came down Found their flesh and lost their skins Flew away on stony wings. Five Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town Walked a road not up nor down Were torn to many and turned to one, In the end, left a task half-done Four Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town They spoke in words without a sound They begged their Queen to let them go And what became of them, no one can know. Three Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town They’d helped a king to keep his crown. But when they tried to climb the hill Down they came in a terrible spill. Two Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town Gentle women there they found. Forgot their quest and lived in love Perhaps were wiser than ones above. One Wiseman came to Jhaampe-town. He set aside both Queen and Crown Did his task and fell asleep Gave his bones to the stones to keep. No wise men go to Jhaampe-town, To climb the hill and never come down. ‘Tis wiser far and much more brave To stay at home and face the grave.

Once I got away from him, I was smart enough to stay away from him. To hunt that one is as wise as to go hunting a porcupine. I cannot leave this alone, Nighteyes. I understand. I am the same about porcupines.

I'm not fooled, assassin. You may think you are removed from us—that you have come to terms with your own mortality—but I still had to drag Sora out of your arms.

I am a minstrel. I know more about lying than you will ever discover. And minstrels know that sometimes lies are what a man needs most. In order to make a new truth of them.

Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose.

I was the Fool and the Fool was me. He was the Catalyst and so was I. We were two halves of a whole, sundered and come together again. For an instant I knew him in his entirety, complete and magical, and then he was pulling apart from me, laughing, a bubble inside me, separate and unknowable, yet joined to me. "You do love me !" I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. "Before, it was words. I always feared it war born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill". For a moment he reveled in simple recognition.

Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold?

Her nakedness was not vulnerability, but armour.

It was, after all, a time for heroes and all sorts of marvelous things to occur.

Starling lowered her voice, but it carried anyway. “He is FitzChivalry, son of Chivalry the Abdicated. And you are the Fool.” “Once, perhaps, I was the Fool. It is common knowledge here in Jhaampe. But now I am the Toymaker. As I no longer use the other title, you may take it for yourself if you wish. As for Tom, I believe he takes the title Bed Bolster these days.” “I will be seeing the Queen about this.” “A wise decision. If you wish to become her Fool, she is certainly the one you must see. But for now, let me show you something else. No, step back, please, so you can see it all. Here it comes.” I heard the slam and the latch. “The outside of my door,” the Fool announced gladly. “I painted it myself. Do you like it?

A lock does no more than keep an honest man honest,

Some people say there is relief in the sharing of cares and pains. To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring of still suppurating wounds.

there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.

A man has to have a purpose in life. I know this now, but it took me the first score years of my life to learn it. In that I scarcely think myself unique.

The Six Duchies would fall. The world would end. We went to fetch blankets.

We dream of carving our dragon.

I looked at her, wanting her with all the lust of my months alone and untouched. But I knew also that for that deeper hunger for companionship and understanding, she offered me no more solace than any man might find in his own hand.

You will live to love again. You know you have lost your springtime girl, your Molly on the beach with the wind in her brown hair and red cloak. You have been gone too long from her, and too much has befallen you both. And what you loved, what both of you truly loved, was not each other. It was the time of your life. It was the spring of your years, and life running strong in you, and war on your doorstep and your strong, perfect bodies. Look back, in truth. You will find you recall fully as many quarrels and tears as you do lovemaking and kisses. Fitz. Be wise. Let her go, and keep those memories intact. Save what you can of her, and let her keep what she can of the wild and daring boy she loved. Because both he and that merry little miss are no more than memories anymore." She shook her head. "No more than memories.

You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.

I have known beauties and joys that tried my heart's strength as surely as the tragedies and uglinesses have

Children, I have found, are much more swift to accept the unusual. They admit their curiosity, you see, rather than disdaining the object that arouses it.

Then I thought about it and wondered if I would ever reach a place in which I ceased finding out how stupid I could be.

You see, said the wolf. He senses me. Not clearly, but he does. Hello, Fool. My ears itch. Outside the tent, the Fool reached down suddenly to scratch the wolf’s ears.

There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something.

Death stalks us, and he is ever sure of his kill. It is not a thing to dwell on, but it is something we all know, in our guts and bones. All save humans.

Not babies perhaps. But I know about young things. Foals, puppies, calves, piglets. Even hunting cats. I know if you want them to trust you, you touch them when they are small. Gently, but firmly, so they believe in your strength, too. You don't shout at them, or make sudden moves that look threatening. You give them good feed and clean water, and keep them clean and give them shelter from the weather. You don't take out your temper on them, or confuse punishment with discipline.

Other women snore, or talk in their sleep. I don't recall ever being woken up by the sound of vigorous pencil scratching." "You could always ask one of those other women to marry you," I said. "Though it may not be easy to find one who is quite so tolerant of faerie assassins and strange quests as I am.

All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.

Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day.

But a wall that will not yield to a battering ram can still be breached by the gentle twining of ivy.

They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.

...a great part of what unmanned me was distress at the destruction of my own body. It was odd to realise that I had an emotional attachment to my own flesh. My deep desire to keep it functioning well surpassed simple avoidance of pain. A man takes pride in his body. When it is damaged, it is more than a physical thing.

I made a sudden decision. "and my dog has followed me from town and cought up with us here. I left him with friends, but he must have chewed his rope. here, boy, come to heel." I'll chew your heel off for you, Nighteyes offerd savagely, but he came, following me out into the cleared yard. "Damn big dog," Nick observed. He leaned forward. "looks more than half a wolf to me." "Some in Farrow have told me that. It's a buck breed. We use them for harding sheep." You will pay for this. I promise you. In answer I leaned down to pat his shoulder and then scratch his ears. Wag your tail, Nighteyes. "He's a loyal old dog. I should have known he wouldn't be left behind." The things i endure for you. He wagged his tail. Once.

Useless to worry until we find ourselves blocked, Nighteyes pointed out. If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.

All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don’t you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.

when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent reason, or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.

Anti-Castro Cubans were suspects in the assassination for good reason. The CIA, under the leadership of Soviet KGB officer John McCone, spent considerable time and effort making the anti-Castro Cubans look like they would have a reason to assassinate President Kennedy.

La gente realmente intelligente e aperta non implorerebbe queste spiegazioni. Solo la gente volgare vuole spiegare tutto, anche quello che non si spiega. Perché dovrei dare spiegazioni che gli stupidi non comprenderebbero e di cui le menti più fini non avrebbero voglia?

It is quite one thing to admit a fault to yourself. It is another thing entirely to have a friend not only agree with you, but point out the full depth of the fault.

Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.

Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride. A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed.

I just sat, feeling something inside me go very still. I hoped it was my heart.

The White Prophet and the Catalyst!" she cried in disgust. "Rather name them as they are, the Fool and the Idiot. Of all the careless, foolish things to do!

When you can either laugh or cry, you might as well laugh,

No one truly understands a prophecy until it comes true.

Then I'd be dead," I pointed out. "Among other things. Fool, there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.

All memories are connected, and like a man's skin, they can heal. In time, left to themselves, those memories would have stopped hurting you. You may someday wish you could call up that pain.

I suddenly wished to go back, to have again each separate day to spend. Time. I was trapped in it, fenced into a tiny piece of now that was the only time I could influence. All the soons and tomorrows I might plan were ghost things that might be snatched from me at any moment. Intentions were nothing. Now was all I had.

Why do you chop your life into bits and give the bits names? Hours, days. It is like a rabbit. If I kill a rabit, I eat a rabbit. When you have a rabbit, you chop it up and call it bones and meat and fur and guts. And so you never have enough.

Sir Arthur stopped at the bottom of the hill and awaited the charging rider. The horseman halted in front of Sir Arthur and mud flew in all directions. “Who are you?” demanded Sir Arthur. He stared into the masked face and turbaned head of an assassin. Rufus's heart stopped. A gasp escaped his frozen lips and his legs wobbled. Sir Arthur asked again, “Who are you?” The man dismounted and drew from his golden sash a long scimitar. He approached Sir Arthur. The knight lifted his sword and the duel began.

I know of nothing more warming than hot meat and tea and good fellowship.

Just because a man can do a thing does not mean he should do a thing.

Punjab had sent its boys across an ocean. Waves of grief rolled back.

As well to clutch at the moon’s reflection in a still midnight pond as to seek a grip on that bright mind.

I'm being sentimental, she thought, and turned to her room. He's an assassin. He doesn't care.

You protect us all from ugliness. I wanted you to have something beautiful,

There are ways to wake a man out of even the deepest sleep, even the sleep caused by a stout beating. Rothar’s preferred method was to hold a flame to a man’s foot.

Sleet

I rode a horse, didn’t I, when I had one? Was it because I was better than the horse that I bent it to my will? I’d used dogs to hunt for me, and hawks on occasion. What right had I to command them? There I sat, stripping the hide off a porcupine to eat it. I spoke slowly. ‘Are we better than this porcupine that we are about to eat? Or is it only that we have bested it today?

You almost died!” he said sharply. “Dorian is gone, and I don't want any more innocents killed—not at my expense, not at anyone's expense!" She looked at him seriously. This, from an assassin?

Take my memories of my mother, and the feelings that went with them. I do not want to know them at all. Take the ache in my throat when I think of Molly, take all the sharp-edged, bright-colored days I recall with her. Take their brilliance and leave me but the shadows of what I saw and felt. Let me recall them without cutting myself on their sharpness. Take my days and nights in Regal’s dungeons. It is enough to know what was done to me. Take it to keep, and let me stop feeling my face against that stone floor, hearing the sound of my nose breaking, smelling and tasting my own blood. Take my hurt that I never knew my father, take my hours of staring up at his portrait when the great hall was empty and I could do so alone. Take my— Fitz. Stop. You give her too much, there will be nothing left of you.

The massacre transformed Udham Singh. Vengeance took over his life, and for the next twenty years, though he would be given numerous chances to live a happy and fulfilling existence, he would continue his quest, travelling thousands of miles, meeting a variety of people, learning what he needed, trying to become the avenging angel for his people. A man born with so little, who wanted to be so much more.

The followers of Saint Brigantia claim it was Mortain's quest for full knowledge of life that led Him to seek Amourna out and open His heart to her, for how can one truly understand life without knowing love?

Competence was never guaranteed in the prophesies. Only persistence. What does White Colum say? ‘They come like raindrops against the stone towers of time. But in time it is always the rain that prevails, not the tower.

When he stopped hitting me and seized my wrists, I darted my head in and bit his hand as hard as I could. He roared and then screamed with pain and outrage. Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning.

A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: “I have been thrown into a far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.

As we shouldered our packs and set off, I reflected bitterly that I had walked away from people I had known and cared about to avoid the very situation I was now in with comparative strangers. I wondered if there was any way to live amongst people and refuse to be harnessed by their expectations

Honor and courtesy and justice…they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.

We do not share. We are one. I am no longer a wolf, you are no longer a man. What we are together, I have no name for. Perhaps the one who spoke to us of the Old Blood would have a word to explain it. He paused. See how much a man I am, that I speak of having a word for an idea? No word is needed. We exist, and we are whatever we are.

You leave so much behind to do this," I said awkward, thinking of his tools, his half-finished puppets, even the plants growing inside by the window. Despite myself, I felt responsabile for it. Perhaps it was because I was glad that I was not going on alone. He glanced over me and shrugged. "I take myself with me. That's all I truly need, or own.

Some say ‘a dog’ or ‘a horse’ as if every one of them is like every other. I’ve heard a man call a mare he had owned for seven years ‘it’ as if he were speaking of a chair. I’ve never understood that. One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.

She sat back again, a gentle loosening that made her straight spine seem effortless and restful. Again she did nothing. She simply sat across from me and unfurled herself. I felt her life brush up against me and flow around me. It was but the faintest touching, and had I not experienced both the Skill and the Wit, I do not think I would have sensed it. Cautiously, as softly as if I assayed a bridge made of cobweb, I overlay my senses on hers. She quested. Not as I did, toward a specific beast, or to read what might be close by. I discarded the word I had always given to my sensing. Kettricken did not seek after anything with her Wit. It was as she said, simply a being, but it was being a part of the whole. She composed herself and considered all the ways the great web touched her, and was content. It was a delicate and tenuous thing and I marveled at it. For an instant I, too, relaxed. I breathed out. I opened myself, Wit wide to all. I discarded all caution, all worry that Burrich would sense me. I had never done anything to compare it with before. Kettricken's reaching was as delicate as droplets of dew sliding down a strand of spiderweb. I was like a dammed flood, suddenly released, to rush out to fill old channels to overflowing and to send fingers of water investigating the lowlands. Let us hunt! The Wolf, joyfully. In the stables, Burrich straightened from cleaning a hoof, to frown at no one. Sooty stamped in her stall. Molly shrugged away and shook out her hair. Across from me, Kettricken started and looked at me as if I had spoken aloud. A moment more I was held, seized from a thousand sides, stretched and expanded, illuminated pitilessly. I felt it all, not just the human folk with their comings and goings, but every pigeon that fluttered in the eaves, every mouse that crept unnoticed behind the wine kegs, every speck of life, that was not and never had been a speck, but had always been a node on the web of life. Nothing alone, nothing forsaken, nothing without meaning, nothing of no significance, and nothing of importance.

He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him, until they take no satisfaction in a contest of skill that draws no blood, until games are only amusing if lives are wagered on the outcome. The very coinage of life becomes debased. Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man’s life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit?

In truth, I believe the Wit is as natural a magic as a man can claim. It is the Wit that lets a flock of birds in flight suddenly wheel as one, or a school of fingerlings hold place together in a swiftly flowing stream. It is also the Wit that sends a mother to her child’s bedside just as the babe is awakening. I believe it is at the heart of all wordless communication, and that all humans possess some small aptitude for it, recognized or not.

Nighteyes whined again, and I felt an irrational urge to snarl back at him. He must have known that, but still he came, flipping my elbow up with his nose and then burrowing his head under my arm until his great gray head was up against my chest and my arm around his shoulders. He tossed his nose up suddenly, clacking his muzzle painfully against my chin. I hugged him hard, and he turned to rub his throat against my face. The ultimate gesture of trust, wolf to wolf, that baring of the throat to another's possible snarl. After a moment I sighed, and the pain of loss I felt over a thing was less.

Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. Thus Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel’s Far Right until his assassination in New York in 1990: There

Who really benefited from the death of President Kennedy? Oswald only served as a straw man.[86] Unbeknownst to him, he was being prepared by the CIA and the FBI for his role as a scapegoat. Do not forget that there are often mind control elements at work in these kinds of political assassinations (See chapter 44, Josef Mengele and Monarch Mind Control). Lyndon B. Johnson had foreknowledge of the plan to kill Kennedy. His longtime lover, Madeleine Brown, wrote about Johnson’s foreknowledge of the assassination in her book Texas in the Morning (see also Benjamin Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy 1975). One day before Kennedy was killed, Johnson said: “Tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat, that’s a promise.” Why John Kennedy choosed Lyndon Johnson as his running mate is unknown. He and his brother Robert did not like Johnson at all. They knew that Johnson stole the election that put him in the US Senate. There were also many scandals swirled around Johnson as vice president and a string of murders that may be associated with him. To his assistant Hyman Raskin, Kennedy once said: “You know, we had never considered Lyndon. But I was left with no choice. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems.” Who were those bastards? Did he refer to the Illuminati? There is no doubt that Kennedy had been submitted to blackmail. Kennedy excused his choice of Johnson several times: “The whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well that it won’t be.” Lyndon Johnson, who was an Illuminati mole, was up to his neck into the conspiracy. He had orders to cover everything up. Within hours of the killing, he placed all the weight of his newly acquired authority to obstruct the quest for the truth. He received the full support of the CIA and FBI director Edgar Hoover, who circulated a memo asserting his conviction that Oswald had acted on his own initiative. Harvey Oswald fired just three bullets from above and behind. Did he really wound all the limousine’s occupants with these shots? The killing of Kennedy is more complex than is usually admitted. Officially, one of Oswald´s bullets hit Kennedy twice and Governor John Connally who was sitting in the front seat of the limousine, three times!