K.J. Parker quotes:

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

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

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.

Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.

In politics, it's what isn't said that matters.

It doesn't matter if your ignorant so long as you can find people to know stuff for you.

The enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible.

War is an admission of failure

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.

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

Faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.

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.

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

If there's a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?

That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?

The easiest way to do anything is properly.