Glen Cook Quotes

Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.

Evil is relative…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.

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.

Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

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.

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.

. . .and the thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.

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.

Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.

In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.

The only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions.

I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English." [The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook, The SF Site, September 2005]

Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.

Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?

My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.

If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right.......all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance.

I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams.

I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.

Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.

Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.

Best way out,” Elmo observed laconically, “would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords.” “Sounds a little extreme,” Goblin opined. “But if you want to go first, I’m right behind you.

Ah, the smell of mystery and dark doings, of skulduggery and revenge. The meat of a good tale.

I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.

Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony.” The Black Company pg 447

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

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.

I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled towards 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.

Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.

I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.

In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.

Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.

Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.

I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true.

No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners

There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.

You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.

No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.

You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.

Part of winning is a downdeep certainty that, no matter how bad things look, a road to victory will open.

One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.

Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The

She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

She is the darkness.

books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

Back to the company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to the annals. Back to fear.

One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight. Lightning

Priests of a thousand cults proclaim the essential goodliness of Man. They must be fools. All I see is people flinging themselves at the chance to do evil.

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.

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.

I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.

The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.

Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then

We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

The price of order,” I muttered. I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn’t budge. “The cost of chaos,” Tom-Tom countered. Thump on his drum. “Not quite the same thing, Croaker.

Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

Maybe. We're all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!

A herd of minuscule lightning bugs poured out of One-Eye's nostrils. Good soldiers all, they fell into formation, spelling out the words Goblin is a Poof.

Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.

No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our only mourners. It is the Company against the world. Thus it has been and ever will be.

An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. “I am a soldier.” I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy’s own Dejagoran dialect. “I’ve been distracted before. I’m still alive.

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.

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.

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 that we are just plain nice folks.

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

I was never really a girl, or a woman, or a human being to Raven, Case. Even though he did awful things for me. I was a symbol, an expiation, and when I insisted on becoming a person he did the only thing he could do to keep on serving the symbol and not have to deal with a flesh-and-blood woman.

I am not religious. I cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity’s frothy carryings-on. I mean, logically, beings of that order just wouldn’t.

I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive.

Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.

No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.

Truth is a deadly weapon, Lady said.

He surveyed his audience with that look of sublime solemnity only a drunk can muster.

Leaders shouldn’t enjoy leadership, she told herself. Like Glen said, it should be a role one takes because one feels obligated.

What did we do today to frighten the world?

Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony.

None of us are going to get out of this alive so we might as well grab a laugh while we can.

The Lady was medicine bad enough. The Dominator, though, was the body of which her evil was but a shadow. Or so the legend goes. I sometimes wonder why, if that is true, she walks the earth and he lies restless in the grave.

It was one of those moments in which I become very uncomfortable. One of those times when nothing you say can be right, and almost anything you do say is wrong. I could see no answer but the classic Croaker approach. I began to back away. That is how I handle my women. Duck for cover when they get distressed. I almost made it to the door. She could move when she wanted. She crossed the gap and put her arms around me, rested a cheek against my chest. And that is how they handle me, the sentimental fool. The closet romantic.

If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possibly remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.

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.

Closer at hand, the wheeling gulls were as surly and lackadaisical as the day promised to make most men.

One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.

Let’s say the madonnas of the night in Elm were severely disappointed in the Black Company.

Okay, Croaker. What the hell happened?” “I don't know. The falling sickness?” “Give him some of his own soup,” somebody suggested. “Serve him right.” A tin cup appeared. We forced its contents down his throat. His eye clicked open. “What are you trying to do? Poison me? Feh! What was that? Boiled sewage?” “Your soup,” I told him.

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward. Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure. As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.

A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.

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. I was her truth object, and she was mine.

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.

The Dead Man once told me that monsters aren’t born, they’re made. That they are memorials which take years of cruelty to sculpt. And that while we should weep for the tortured child who served as raw material, we should permit no sentiment to impede us while we rid the world of the terror strewn by the finished work. It took me a while to figure out what he meant but I do understand him now.

Every ruler makes enemies. The Lady is no exception. The Sons of the White Rose are everywhere.… If one chooses sides on emotion, then the Rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honor: freedom, independence, truth, the right.… All the subjective illusions, all the eternal trigger-words. We are minions of the villain of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance. There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

Limper flopped violently. The gag flew out of his mouth. His ankle bonds parted. He gained his feet, tried to run, tried to mouth some spell that would protect him. He had gone thirty feet when a thousand fiery snakes streaked out of the night and swarmed him. They covered his body. They slithered into his mouth and nose, into his eyes and ears. They went in the easy way and came gnawing out through his back and chest and belly. And he screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

About you and me, Croaker and his gang, the Lady, Silent, Darling. About all the things we had in common but still couldn’t get along.” “I didn’t see all that much you had in common. Not once you got past having the same enemies.” “Neither did I for a long time. And none of them saw it, either. Else we all might have tried a little harder.” I tried to look like I gave a shit at three in the morning. “Basically we’re all lonely, unhappy people looking for our place, Case. Loners who’d really rather not be but don’t know how. When we get to the door that would let us in—or out—we can’t figure out how to work the latch string.

Singe stopped. “You are quite right about Medford Shale, Garrett.” Great-uncle Medford had figured prominently in the case where I’d first made Singe’s acquaintance. “Just as you were right about me needing no distractions if I am to follow this trail. Perhaps I can have Doris knock you out, then have Marsha knock Doris out, then pray that a building collapses on Marsha.” “Or we could all take a hint and save the chatter till later.” “You could do that. But I am willing to bet that none of you are able.” Was it Mama Garrett’s boy who’d said that this ratgirl desperately needed some self-confidence? She sure didn’t lack for it in this crowd.