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656 pages, Hardcover
First published November 16, 2021
“Longing. Look for it, in every crowd, and you will find it. Paint it any colour you choose: grief, nostalgia, melancholy, remembrance, these are but flavours, poetic reflections.”
“The stupid knew better than to look into their wake. The wise could not help it and so suffered greatly. This was humanity’s great divide, and many a time, Damisk had envied the stupid and all the obstinate incomprehension he saw in their eyes and faces. In the end, it takes wisdom to scream.”
“Lad, the most powerful constant is stupidity. Nothing else comes close. Stupidity kills all the animals, empties the sky of birds, poisons the rivers, burns the forests, wages the wars, feeds the lies, invents the world over and over again in ways only idiots could think real. Stupidity, lad, will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire. Because, in the end, stupid people outnumber smart people. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t suffer over and over again, through generation after generation and on for ever.”
“The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you? It follows, quite reasonably, that every generation is righteous in cursing the one that precedes it. Namely, yours. And the vicious fighting withdrawal that is your own conservatism – this bitter, hate-filled war against change – is doomed to fail, because no age lasts for ever. One follows upon the next and this is an inescapable fact. So step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom. The age dies with you, as it must, and you now show its face to be that of a mewling child who can no longer hold on to what has ceased to exist. Synthraeas”
“To be believed in is an obligation. Only by heeding that obligation are you made worthy of that belief.”
“It was good to have people like that looking out for you. The kind who went through life quietly, sincerely and consistently.”
“To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next. The eyes of the innocent see a world very differently from what you and I see. To know this is to revisit one's own loss, eye to eye with sad reflection, and to feel once more that dreadful ache in your chest.”
"To witness is to begin to see. To see is to begin to know. To know is to recoil."
"Malazan justice doesn't stop at the grave's edge."
"A soldier's loyalty died to a thousand cuts, until it seemed there was no hope of finding it again - not to an empire, not to a commander, not even to a faith. "
"The most powerful constant is stupidity. Nothing else comes close. Stupidity kills all the animals, empties the sky of birds, poisons the rivers, burns the forests, wages the war, feeds the lies, invents the world over and over again in ways only idiots could think real. Stupidity will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire."
Want to see it in terms of good and evil, of right and wrong? That's not the way of the Wilds, because those words are really about people judging other people and the problem with that is, you can't find truth studying the scales if your own eye's skewed. And everyone's eyes are skewed, whether they admit it or not."
Something’s always happening. It’s why misery gets no rest.
- Karsa Orlong
If not for what had happened with his mother, he could have stayed there for ever. It wouldn’t be happiness but then, happiness wasn’t kind anyway, the way it could vanish in an instant. He might not miss it at all.