Peter McLean > Quotes

“One thing I have noticed in life is that the men who speak the most of honor are usually those who have the least of it.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Kneeling in the temple doesn’t make you godly any more than standing in a stable makes you a horse, to my mind.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“At first you think you want to pour out your feelings into the bottle, but you come to realise that you don’t. You just want to drown them, to burn them away with alcohol until it stops hurting.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“a god who had nothing better to worry about than who you might choose to fuck didn’t sound like he was worth much, to my mind.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Where is the difference between holy and possessed? I wondered. When does miracle become magic, magic become witchcraft? Is it in the nature of the deed itself, or in the eye of the beholder? Is it decided in the telling after the fact, and if so does it depend on who does that telling?”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Have faith, you miserable git," the Burned Man said. "Where there's a will there's a way, and all that. You have made a will, haven't you?”
― Peter McLean, Drake

“Tactics win skirmishes, strategies win battles.
And logistics win wars.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Crowns

“Stop calling me “the Woman”. Your brother Jochan came up with that name and I’ve never cared for it. Maybe I wept when I done hard things, but who hasn’t? It ain’t only women who weep.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“You didn’t hit women, not unless they were armed and they were trying to kill you. You didn’t hit whores, and you most definitely didn’t hit your own fucking wife. Anyone who needed that explained to him wasn’t someone I knew how to talk to in a civil fashion.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“I nodded, understanding. I didn’t know this Stone Father, but a god who had nothing better to worry about than who you might choose to fuck didn’t sound like he was worth much, to my mind.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Men who have been through Hell together tend to stay together, if they can.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“No, I wasn’t supposed to go into the kitchen, that wouldn’t have been seemly. Yes, of course I could have a drink, but that meant ringing a bell that summoned a footman who sent a houseboy to the kitchen to pester an undercook to draw me a mug of beer from the barrel and give it to him to bring back to the footman to give to me, when I would quite happily have just gone and got the fucking thing myself.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“When even sappers fear a man, I had thought at the time, that man is to be feared indeed.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“Our Lady doesn’t help. Not ever. She doesn’t answer prayers or grant boons or give a man anything at all, however hard he might pray for it. The best you can hope for from her is that she doesn’t take your life today. Maybe tomorrow, aye, but not today. That’s as good as it gets, and the rest is up to you.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Truth be told, I don’t know,” I said. “They say in the temple that sometimes a man has to balance two evils in his hands, and choose the lighter one.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“Tradition’ is a word that often means ‘performative horseshit’, I have found,”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Crowns

“acting the respectable gentleman had been chafing at me. I found I much preferred to be a disreputable gentleman.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Crowns

“This is the Mother Inferior,’ Aunt Enaid said to me. ‘How dare you!’ the other woman screamed at her. ‘I’ll have you switched to within an inch of your life for that!’ ‘Switch this,’ Aunt Enaid said, and punched the Mother Superior full in the face.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Being out after curfew was punishable with a fine brutal enough to send any commoner straight to debtor’s gaol, but ‘punishable with a fine’ means ‘legal for rich people’ and it always has done, so there were no concerns there.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Crowns

“When sappers fear a man, that man is to be feared indeed.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“The only thing he hadn’t been able to legislate against was a madman with fanatically loyal followers and an absolute shitload of high explosives. That would be me.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Crowns

“Will kills a man he weeps afterward. Mind you, he’s killed so many fucking men it ain’t funny no more,”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“She was clever too, if uneducated, but then clever and educated are very different things.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Gallows

“Perhaps law and order is just another way of saying tyranny and oppression, but I wouldn’t know. That was a philosophical question, and I couldn’t give a fuck about philosophy.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“She would probably have stabbed me if I had tried it, but I had seen the need in her eyes, nonetheless. Not for romance, no, but for simple human comfort. Somehow that had been so much sadder. Sometimes we all just need a little comfort, and are denied it by circumstance and the harshness of the worlds we build around us.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Gallows

“Perhaps this sort of nonsense was why nobles always seemed to be angry about something.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Lies

“Not for romance, no, but for simple human comfort. Somehow that had been so much sadder. Sometimes we all just need a little comfort,”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Gallows

“a woman is a good deal more important than fucking is, and you can’t feel that with someone you don’t know.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Gallows

“It’s late and I’m tired,’ I said. ‘If Billy wants to float in the air, then I can’t see it’s hurting anyone.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Bones

“Lies upon lies upon lies, until the common man came to doubt his own recollection of what he had heard and what he thought he knew had happened.”
― Peter McLean, Priest of Gallows