Brian Staveley > Quotes

“Assume nothing,’” he said. The first chapter of the Tactics. “If we figure everyone might be a murderer, we’re less likely to be disappointed.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Resist faith. Resist trust. Believe only in what you touch with your hands. The rest is error and air.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Any fool can see what's there. You need to see what is not there.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“You squint hard enough, and everything starts to look suspicious.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“There’s no blade as keen as surprise.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Men tend to die when you slide steel beneath their skin and wiggle it around. Even priests.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“The man still fighting last week’s battle will always lose to the man already fighting tomorrow’s,”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Pain is suffering because we want to be free of it, and pleasure is suffering because we fear to lose it. Fools search for freedom, but there is no freedom. There is only the embrace.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“People kill to get power, they kill to keep power, and they kill if they think they might lose it, which is pretty much always. Even if you and I both stay out of it, even if we both die, whoever came after us will keep coming. They’ll find the next threat, the next worrisome voice, the next person with the wrong name or the wrong skin. Maybe they’ll go after the rich for their coin or the peasants for their rice, the Bascans because they’re too dark or the Breatans because they’re too pale—it doesn’t matter.”
― Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire

“we use the time we have. There is no other.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“There’s no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker”
― Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire

“It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“Easier to recall a loosed falcon than a spoken word.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Leadership isn't just about giving orders. A fool can give orders. A leader listens. He changes his mind. He acknowledges mistakes.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Believe what you see with your eyes; trust what you hear with your ears; know what you feel with your flesh. The rest is dream and delusion.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“I’m doubly sorry for your loss,” the old monk began after a time. “First, because every son should have a chance to know his father, not as a child knows his protector, but as a man knows another man.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Henderson Jakes, the founder of the Eyrie, had envisioned a cadre of elite soldiers dedicated to celibacy, the empire, and the art of war. He had to settle for two out of three. Young men and women willing to leap off massive birds into burning buildings at a mere nod from a commanding officer grew violently rebellious when required to abstain from sex.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“Hope, as usual, proved to be a miserable bitch.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“... we are all dying, all the time. Being born is stepping from the cliff's edge. The only question is what to do while falling.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“It takes work to keep the world whole. A simple thing like a cup needs to be cleaned each day, placed carefully back on the shelf, not dropped. A city, in its own way, is every bit as delicate. People move over the causeways, ply the canals with their oars, go between their markets and their homes, buy and barter, swindle and sell, and all the while, mostly unknowingly, they are holding that city together. Each civil word is a stitch knitting it tight. Every law observed, willingly or grudgingly, helps to bind the whole. Every tradition, every social more, every act of neighborly goodwill is a stay against chaos. So many souls, so much effort, so difficult to create and so simple to shatter.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“The fighters who frighten you are not the fighters to fear. The man you barely notice will be the one to bury a blade in your back.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“It’s built into the job. Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.” Adare”
― Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire

“When you know nothing about a creature," the monk ground out, his voice as hard as a rock slide, "expect it has come to kill you.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“I'm losing the game, which means I have three choices: cede, fight back..." ...Kaden smiled, "Or break the board.”
― Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire

“The more you try to see, the less you will notice.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage.
Silence is a hammer that shatters the walls of speech.
Stillness is strength; pain a soft bed.
Put down your basin; emptiness is the only vessel.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“The mind is a flame. Blow it out, or it will blind you.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“The mind was a clay pot set out in the rain. A monk could empty it daily and still the old hopes and worries, the body’s meager strengths and perennial pains pattered against the bottom, trickled down the sides, filling it once more.”
― Brian Staveley, The Emperor's Blades

“If the people are foolish, he said, it is because their leader has failed them.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“Often there is no good path. That does not mean we should not walk.”
― Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire