Brent Weeks

“The perfect killer has no identity.”

“ A lie told in the service of truth is virtue.”

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”

“The perfect killer has no conscience.”

“Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.”

“Cruelty walked the Warrens holding hands with poverty and rage.”

““What do you want? Why am I here?” Rat asked.“Ah, petulance and philosophy all bound up in one.””

“It wouldn’t be the first time his sharp tongue had cut his own throat.”

“You aren’t making art, you’re making corpses. Dead is dead.”

“A solicitor is a man who does worse things within the law than most crooks do outside it.”

“You’re either being terrifically subtle or making no sense at all.”

“Hope is the lies we tell ourselves about the future.”

“It may be beyond your comprehension, but I can hold power without using it.”

“See, you get caught up in the past and you become useless to the present.”

“Agon wondered what god Cenaria had offended to deserve such a king.”

“So he wasn’t dead. That was probably supposed to be a good thing.”

““That pain you feel,” Master Blint said almost gently, “is the pain of abandoning a delusion. The delusion is meaning, Kylar. There is no higher purpose. There are no gods. No arbiters of right and wrong. I don’t ask you to like reality. I only ask you to be strong enough to face it. There is nothing beyond this.”

“I’m trying to do what’s right, whether or not that measures up with what men call honorable. There’s a gap between those, you know?”

“Kylar woke two hours before dawn and briefly wondered if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep.”

“They’re schemers, so they see schemes.”

“Like many who have no reason for pride, that very lack of reason for it made me the prouder. But certain realities have a way of making themselves felt, and debt is one of them.”

““Here I thought they were invincible.”“They’re immortal. It’s not the same thing.””

““I used to believe a lot of things. That doesn’t make them true,” Durzo said.”

“Its limbs were loose, graceless, lying in an uncomfortable position. Unmoving. Just like any corpse. In life, every man was unique. In death every man was meat.”

“The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.”