David Eddings

“All right, lady, I’m woodsy. So what? If you don’t like the way I look, don’t look at me. I don’t have any parents, and I wear rags because that’s all I can find to wear. I don’t see where that’s any of your business, though. I’m too busy staying alive to worry about how I look, and if you don’t like it that way, well, that’s just too bad.”

Andine was gaping at Gher. “People don’t talk to me that way!” she gasped.

“Not to your face, maybe,” Gher shot back, “but I think if you’d close your mouth and listen to other people once in a while, you might find out what they really think of you. But you don’t want to know, do you? I wasn’t raised in a palace the way you were, lady. I grew up in a garbage heap, so I don’t have fancy manners.”

“I don’t have to listen to this!”

“Maybe you don’t have to, but you really should. I breathe in and out the same as you do, lady, and you don’t own the air, so it belongs to me as much as it does to you. Just back away, lady. You make me even sicker than I make you.”

‘Labor contractor’ sounds so much nicer than ‘slave trader,’ wouldn’t you say?

“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.

A good soldier avoids politics and religion, but if all you want me to do is spank them and send them home, we’ll do it that way.

“I’ll need a few kegs of your gold, though,” he added.

Althalus shrugged. “I had a feeling that might crop up.”

“‘Money makes the mare go,’ ” Kreuter quoted.

“Wouldn’t she settle for oats?”

“She might, but I won’t.”

“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.”

Getting some of your people killed is part of the business of command.

You’ve seen all those red rocks in Plakand, haven’t you?

“Oh, yes. Plakand’s red from one end to the other.”

There’s a metal called iron in those rocks. Men couldn’t smelt it out of those rocks until they learned how to make hotter fires. Iron is harder than bronze, but it’s brittle. It has to be mixed with other metals to make weapons or tools.

“It’s completely replaced bronze, then?”

For most things, yes.

“It might be better than bronze, but it’s not as pretty."

Corruption’s a lot of fun, Em. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try it?

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.