Angelo’s Reviews > Toll the Hounds > Status Update

In his experience, purity was an unpleasant concept, and to imagine worlds defined by purity filled him with fear. An existence held to be pure was but the physical corollary of a point of view bound in certainty. Cruelty could thrive unfettered by compassion. The pure could see no value among the impure, after all. Justifying annihilation wasn’t even necessary, since the inferiority was ever self-evident.

Tool the Hounds is amazing — as any Malazan book — however, there is too much going on, too many plots, too many characters... I feel more lost than when I first started with Gardens of the Moon.

Iskaral Post’s love was pure and perfect, except that his wife kept getting in the way.

Omg

Coin purchased power, like a god blessing the devout, both of power and wrath there could never be enough.

Romance was for fools, he now knew. No one valued the given heart, no one saw that sacrifice for the precious gift it was. No, just a thing to be grasped, twisted by uncaring hands, then wrung dry and discarded. Or a commodity and nothing more, never as desirable as the next one, the one in waiting, or the one held by someone else. Or, far worse, a gift too precious to accept.

There is, as a legion of morose poets well know, nothing inconsequential about love. Nor all those peculiarities of related appetites often confused for love, for example lust, possession, amorous worship, appalling notions of abject surrender where one’s own will is bled out in sacrifice, obsessions of the fetishistic sort that might include earlobes or regurgitated foodstuff, and indeed insane jealousy.

Too bad he’d had to kill every child he begat. No doubt that left most of his wives and lovers somewhat disaffected. But he had not been so cruel as to hesitate, had he? No. Why, he’d tear those ghastly babes from their mother’s arms not moments after they’d tumbled free of the womb, and was that not a true sign of mercy? No one grows attached to dead things, not even mothers.

Kallor needs killing.

That all victories were ultimately transitory in the face of patient nature might well be cause for optimism. No wound was too deep to heal. No outrage too horrendous to one day be irrelevant.

...Alas, its plague of misfortunes was unending.

‘Hold on,’ hissed Mogora. ‘That mule was male! I’d swear it!’

‘Checking him out, were you?’

‘One more step on that track, husband, and I will kill you with my own hands.’

‘Hee hee. What a terrible, disgusting mind you have, wife.’

‘No, you won’t distract me this time. Your mule. Has just changed sex and knowing you I might be looking at a rival...’

‘Popularity is a curse,’ Iskaral said...