Inversions

Quotes

1. Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.

   p. 51

2. 

   Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

   p. 22

3. 

   We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others.

   p. 197

4. 

   “I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.”

   “It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.”

   p. 140

5. 

   “I believe in Providence, mistress.”

   “But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?”

   “No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said.

   p. 126

6. 

   That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.

   p. 3

7. 

   No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!

   p. 45

8. 

   What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.

   p. 371

9. 

   “Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.”

   p. 158

10. 

    People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point.

    p. 177

11. 

    “One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”

    p. 295

12. 

    But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.

    p. 132

13. 

    “Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”

    p. 37

14. 

    I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.

    p. 402

15. 

    “See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.”

    p. 47

16. 

    You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.

    p. 69

17. 

    Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

    p. 125

18. 

    Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.

    p. 127

19. 

    Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician.

    p. 130

20. 

    Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.

    p. 399

21. 

    There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but...

    p. 335

22. 

    The only sin is selfishness.

    p. 1

That’s all the quotes.

22 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more