David Eddings

“What’s it like?” Andine asked curiously. “Hearing the thoughts of others, I mean?”

“Disturbing,” Leitha replied. “What people say and what they’re thinking don’t always exactly match. We’re much closer to being animals than most of us would care to admit.”

The most important part of strategy is keeping your men alive. If you take care of your men, they’ll take care of you.

“I wouldn’t have any trouble working for a woman,” Chief Gweti bleated, “as long as she’s rich enough. I’d work for a rich goat, if he offered me enough gold.”

You want gold, I suppose? she asked in an accusatory tone.

“Oh, gold’s all right, I suppose, but I’d really rather get paid in love. Love can’t be counted, so it’s probably even more valuable than gold.”

Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?

“When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.”

What gave you the absurd idea that [the world]’s broken?

“It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.”

[...]

Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.

"This grey’s sort of depressing.”

What on earth has that got to do with anything?“It’s a question of aesthetics, Em. We should always strive to fill our lives with beauty.”

I don’t see anything beautiful in something that was designed to kill people.

“There’s beauty in everything, Em. You just have to learn to look for it.”If you’re going to preach at me, I think I’ll just curl up and go back to sleep.

Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

The word “coincidence” always seems to start religious arguments for some reason.

I don’t like to contaminate a good story with truth, Em. That’d be a violation of my artistic integrity, wouldn’t it?