Glen Cook

When the going gets tough, the smart get going and the stupid keep heading toward trouble.

People don’t want to be told to do right. They don’t really want to do right. They want to do whatever they want—and whine that it’s not fair, it’s not their fault, when it comes time to pay the piper.

I’m a guy who doesn’t understand intangible stakes. I know some would argue that I have a set of values I take pretty seriously, but if I can’t eat it or spend it or make it go purr in the night, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s a weakness, a blind spot. Sometimes I forget that there are guys willing to get killed over ideas.

However, proof or lack thereof are unnecessary to the mind that must believe. And that mind becomes doubly narrow and doubly dangerous when it is given what it perceives as proof. Then it can begin to create that in which it believes.

I had a thought. That happens. So do lunar eclipses.

Even when you have your mind made up, you can’t stay blind to reality forever.

“I know what I’m doing.”

You usually think you do. Occasionally you are correct.

You don’t alter the past, turn the tide, or change yourself by brooding about your hidden motives. You will surprise yourself every time, anyway. Nobody ever figures out why.

The human capacity for mischief is boundless.

Often all we need to be civil with one another is the presence of a referee we don’t want thinking us fools.

She wanted to be crazy. She said when you’re crazy the truth is whatever you want it to be. She wanted what she remembered not to be true.

If you ask me, the difference between a hero and a coward is that a hero find some damn-fool way to con himself into going ahead instead of doing the sensible thing.