31 Quotes by Benedict Jacka

I suppose I should look on the bright side. I might be going to an indictment, but at least it wasn’t mine. Yet.

Now it had finally happened, I wasn’t scared at all. It was more like a relief, as though something inevitable had finally arrived. What I felt more than anything else was the old alertness, that animalistic sense of danger. Everything but the present fades away and there’s nothing but surviving, one hour and one day at a time.

I once read an article which made the argument that modern Western schools have a good deal in common with modern prisons, and I’ve always thought it was pretty accurate. With both schools and prisons, the ones running the system have a very simple set of priorities for their inmates: they want them to stay on the premises, they want them to stay healthy and watered and fed, and they want them not to be gratuitously violent in a way that’ll draw public attention.

If this is how you guys run your ops,’ Kyle said, ‘I’m starting to seriously wonder how you’re still alive.

Reluctantly, she promised to be there and not to try to run away. As soon as I was out of sight, Meredith tried to run away.

Okay – I said – I’m going to tell you something important, so listen closely. It’s something most mages never learn at all. The most powerful weapon you have is your mind. Magic doesn’t mean anything unless you know the right way to use it.

Most people think combat’s about attacks and weapons but it’s not. It’s about movement and information.

Different moves make different sounds – the steady tread of someone walking, the scrape of shifting feet, the patter of someone in a hurry – and with practice you can learn to filter them, picking out the ones that don’t fit in. It’s nothing to do with magic, just simple awareness, a primal skill that anyone can learn but which most people in the modern age have forgotten. But anyone who lives as a predator or a prey learns it fast.

My magic senses danger by seeing the futures in which I’m hurt. As I see the futures in which I’m injured or killed, I change decisions that lead to them. But it’s painful. To avoid a future in which I die, I have to experience it. I’ve learned to shield myself from the psychic shock of those visions, taking only a hazy glance, enough to know hot to avoid that future and no more.