“The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.”

“Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.”

“It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.”

“I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.”

“...let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent.”

“I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.”

“More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.”