Kj Parker Quotes

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

Basic fact of life: no matter how far you run, you always take yourself with you.

A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing.

He turned away, and suddenly she thought about the old children's story, where the stupid girl opens the box that God gave her, and all the evils of the world fly out, except Hope, which stays at the bottom; and she wondered what Hope was doing in there in the first place, in with all the bad things. Then the answer came to her, and she wondered how she could've been so stupid. Hope was in there because it was evil too, probably the worst of them all, so heavy with malice and pain that it couldn't drag itself out of the opened box.

The world is full of annoyances, none more infuriating than a fool with a valid point.

War is an admission of failure

I rarely ask for suggestions, because, when I do, people tend to make them.

I like to let them talk things out, but fact isn’t a democratic process; if a thing isn’t true it isn’t true, even if everybody votes that it is.

wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it.

A wise man once said, it’s not the despair that destroys you, it’s the hope.

It’s a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit.

I mention this because that’s how the world changes. It’s either so quick that we never know what hit us, or so gradual that we don’t notice.

How can anyone doubt the existence of God when evidence of His sense of humour surrounds us on all sides?

The quickest way to a man`s heart,' said the instructor, 'is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket.

We live in a miserable world, where the best we can honestly hope for is that one empty, meaningless day will follow another without things getting actively worse.

Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.

Libraries are the granary of the spirit, without which we could not survive the siege.

If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?

Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it’s just you and you know you’re basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

Of the people, by the people, for the people. I can’t remember offhand where that quote comes from; it was something to do with some bunch of wild-eyed idealists overthrowing the tyrant so they could become tyrants themselves. No good will have come of it, you can be sure. The people; God help us.

It`s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do because it`s expected of them, or they think it`s expected of them.

If there’s one truth in this life, it’s that you simply can’t win. The most you can achieve is to make a nuisance of yourself, for a very short time.

There is no absolute right or wrong, good or evil, but there are good manners and common decency.

Remarkable how often there's a good reason that masks the real reason.

I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it.

Memories are tricky; there’s what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.

There's an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it's a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm's way.

But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth.

You can lead the people to water, but you can’t make them think. Nobody, it seems, can do that.

A quiet life," Stheno replied. "You wouldn't think it was a lot to ask.

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

in an ideal world, you’d be able to pick beef puddings from a beef pudding tree.

Partly, he said, he enjoyed my company; it wasn’t often that he had a chance to talk to someone whose mind was so little cluttered with education or accepted opinions— (“You mean I’m stupid.” “Good heavens, no. Just ignorant.”)

Of course, I never beat Ogus at anything, unless I cheated. Which I did, whenever I could. I figure, winning is winning. Cheating is just one of many ways of prevailing; just happens to be the way I’m best at.

It's sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love because everybody dies but the love they cause to be in others doesn't die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow therefore love is the greatest evil.

Everyone keeps telling me what I can’t do, but they’re wrong. The only thing I can’t do is nothing.

I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? “That’s like saying the cat’s cat is a dog.

(The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)

Here lies Mago the boxer, of whom it may honestly be said that he never harmed anybody.

I know she comes across as annoying to begin with,” he said. “But once you’ve got to know her a bit better, you’ll find it makes no difference whatsoever.

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference.

An old man I met in the slave camp told me once, always be positive. He died of gangrene, something it’s hard to be positive about, and he spent his last week on earth whimpering, but I’ve always tried to follow his advice, even so.

Most wars start because someone makes a mistake, and most battles are lost by the losing side rather than won by the victors. I'm not sure if that makes things better or worse. I suppose it depends on which you disapprove of more, malice or stupidity.

Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case.

When you get to my age, you’ll find it’s fatally easy to forget to hate all your enemies all the time; and once you’ve slipped up and not hated one of them, it makes it almost impossibly hard to hate the rest of them.

Ah". Tzimisces smiled. "Let me guess. Flowery periphrases, back-to-back literary allusions and quotations from thousand-year-old authors. A marked reluctance to use one word when twelve can be jammed in if you sit on the lid.

It slowly dawned on me that it’s possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can’t figure out the politics, or they think it’ll be horrendously unpopular, or it’ll cost too much money,

It’s how I do things. First, despair. Then hope.

Always tell as much truth as you can when you’re lying,” he said. “Nothing deceives like the truth.

My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I'm not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn't carry on the way it's been so far.

I tend to keep my thoughts to myself, which is why I scowl a lot,

Moral: don’t play with savage things that are stronger than you are.

And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can’t do anything about. You can’t make it come if you want it, and you can’t make it go if you don’t.

I always come back to Saloninus's definition of a sword - a piece of metal with a slave on both ends.

Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

The fact is, the more you look for something, the likelier you are to find it, even if it isn't actually there; Sooner or later, if you look hard enough, you'll find something. The trick is then to interpret what you've found as what you were looking for.

What gets people going is stuff that doesn’t mean shit but sounds great. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. I have a dream. Drain the swamp. Yes, we can. It’s the sound of the words and the cadences.

Being, in my own small way, a part of Authority, it never ceases to amaze me how much people believe in it and trust it. I see it from the inside, of course—inefficiencies, stupidities, corruption, bloody-minded ignorance and simple lack of resources to cope with the magnitude of the endless, ever-multiplying problems. But other people see it from the outside. They see the Land Walls. They see the emperor’s head on the coins, with Victory on the reverse. They see the temples. They see soldiers in shining armour. They see, and they believe, that the empire is big, strong, wise, unbeatable.

My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things. I understand stuff like tensile strength, shearing force, ductility, work hardening, stress, fatigue. I know the same sort of things happen with people, but the rules are subtly different. And nobody’s ever paid for my time to get to know about people

Take the truly dreadful, evil men of history, slaughterers of nations in the name of some twisted ideal. Of necessity you must allow them to have had Faith (which moves mountains, and without which mere works are in vain) and Hope, Loyalty, and Self-Sacrifice in the Name of the Cause, and practically every other noble and glorious characteristic you can possibly think of, except for the small matter of being in the right. . .

And with every massive success you notch up, you ask for and get more money, not because you want it to buy things with but because it’s the only reliable way in this business of keeping score. If you’re getting x every night but your best friend and deadliest rival is getting x+1, it’s enough to break your heart. So you try harder, and harder still.

I have my faults. But when I hear bad news that’s palpably true, I don’t argue or ask for proof.

He looked at me the way the male spider gazes at his beloved. He knows he’s going to get eaten afterwards, but it’ll be worth it. “Deal,” he said.

Like I said, I’m a disappointment to her. She wanted me to be a murderer and an extortionist, like my father.

but anyone who tells you it’s impossible to be madly in love with two people at the same time clearly doesn’t go to the theatre.

When you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it.

I’m starting to get the enemy and the auditors muddled up in my mind. I’m terrified of both of them, but the auditors know where I live.

Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.

Better the devil you know, so allow me to introduce myself: I'm the Devil.

He could feel himself sliding into sleep, there was a dream already open and waiting for him to fall into it.

Being dead is bad enough. Being dead and still having to walk around and eat is so much worse.

Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.

My guess is, they couldn't sleep, and they had the kind of generous nature that reckons insomnia isn't something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.

The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most - people who know me, who believe what i tell them - is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them. I can persuade people of things I don't believe myself,or (more usually) simply don't care about

To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?

Witnesses are, of course, ambivalent; some of them need record what would otherwise be lost and go to waste, while others need to hunted down and killed before they cant tell what they know; and the man who stands on the grave of the last witness own the truth and is responsible for it, a dangerous trustee.

If a man exists who is immune to force, even if he's the most blameless anchorite living on top of a column in the middle of the desert, he is beyond government, beyond authority, and cannot be controlled; and that would be intolerable.

It’s like—all right, supposing there’s a fire. What do you do? You grab everyone and everything you can and you get the hell out of there. You don’t agonise about letting the fire win. Staying alive doesn’t make you the fire’s accomplice.

He was astonished at how calm he found he was. Fear of death had always energised him, making him move far more quickly than his body should have been capable of, accelerating his reactions and his thought process to a quite incredible level. This time, though, he only thought, Oh, and realised that he didn't really care all that much. He could feel his responsibilities, the love of others towards him, the unfulfilled possibilities; they were like a child's hand trying to pull him up, doing its best but simply not strong enough for the job. Above all, there was no blame. I tried to climb a wall, but I couldn't, and there it is.

We can’t let him win. Even if it takes fifty years, or a hundred. You can’t let the bad guys win. It’s not acceptable.” For Hodda, life is drama. It falls into a set number of clearly defined categories: tragedy, comedy, romance, burlesque, farce. If it’s a comedy, the good guys win and everybody gets married. If it’s a tragedy, the good guys win but everybody dies. But you can’t let the bad guys win. Nobody’s going to pay to see that. Me, I don’t care about the bad guys, so long as they keep the hell away from me. When they get too close, in my face, I tell lies and run away. That means I’ll never be a hero, but I don’t mind that. I do character parts and impersonations.

A voice in my head said, can’t be helped. Why do I listen to those voices? Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it’s just you and you know you’re basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

It’d have been so nice if my life had been a well-controlled experiment. You know; start off with your basic ingredients, add education, experiences, events, stirring with a glass rod, when appropriate retarding the reaction with a block of ice. Predictable consequences, intended results, and something worth having at the end. Hasn’t quite worked out like that. As for the result, the product, we’ll have to wait and see. I may yet surprise myself.

My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things.

He stared at the coin in his hand, then at me. Then he ran. I’ve seen men running for their lives, but he was faster. Incentive is everything.

I had my pick of three. Never ceases to amaze me, the insane things people will do for money.

He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid.

All his life he'd dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he'd long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he'd been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what's left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.

Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.

The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.

I told you that you wouldn't like me. I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There's this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn't give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn't shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You're kidding, right. That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me.

I've always had this theory, that we're all born with a certain optimum age, the age we're really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I've always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.

But during that time, all the wise scholars and profound thinkers who ran the place fell to brooding on the nature of human society, and came to the conclusion that, left to itself, it didn’t work terribly well. And why? Because, they argued, plausibly enough, it tends to be run by idiots; kings (ruled by their own base desires and hopelessly interbred) or dictators (anyone who seizes power by that very act disqualifies himself from being trusted with it) or oligarchies (irredeemably self-serving and corrupt) or, God help us, democracies (in the republic of the stupid, the half-witted man is prime minister) – there had to be a better way, and to the wisest men in the known world, it was painfully obvious what it was. If a job needs doing, do it ourselves.

It was as though the Gods had dropped something—a comb, a hairpin, a needle—and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us— Excuse me. It was an impressive sight.

Everything changes, see above. Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely. Which is odd, since the past has already happened; it’s done, complete, finished, signed off, sealed, delivered; dead. But, then, dead things change a hell of a lot, as the smell testifies. I tend to think of the past as compost; drifts of dead yesterdays rotting down into a fine mulch, in which all sorts of weeds germinate, sprout and flourish. Of course, the past changes, it can’t not change, and what was true yesterday— See above, passim. Change and decay in all around I see; everything changes, except for me.

Outrageously clever people are worse, but quite a few of them mean well, and often they tend to have disadvantages (of appearance, manner, social skill) that allow you to forgive them. Beautiful people, though, I struggle with. Unless you keep your eyes shut or look the other way, you can’t help but have the awful fact ground into you, like the wheel of a heavy wagon running over your neck, that here is someone divided from you by a vast, unbridgeable gap, and they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

I drew a long breath so I could point out to her all the fallacies in her argument, but then I thought; why? Out of an overwhelming duty to the truth? Fuck, as I may have observed before, the truth. If it was here, would it go out of its way to defend me? Unlikely. The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor. Besides, what is the truth, anyway? In a court of law, it’s the testimony of credible witnesses corroborating each other. She’d been a witness and she knew what she saw. So was I, but even my mother wouldn’t say I was credible. And there’d been hundreds of people there, all rock-solid upright pillars of Dejauzi society. And when I stabbed myself, there were loads of people watching, and they saw what happened with their own eyes. And, come to that, Alyattes was now the nephew of the old emperor and the rightful heir to the throne. He hadn’t been until quite recently, but pretty soon anyone who could testify against his claim would be dead or singing a very different tune, and what was once a lie would become the truth, official, carved on the lintels of triumphal arches; and if you can’t believe what you read on a government arch, what can you believe? All the books would tell it that way, and in a thousand years’ time it will be the truth, just as what was once the bottom of the sea is now a mountaintop. Ask the wise men at the university what truth is and they’ll tell you it’s the consensus of informed and qualified scholars, based on the best evidence available. Availability is governed by what gets burned in the meanwhile, but I see no real problem with that. All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?