8 Quotes by Jay Lake

Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs.

A goddess is the sum of all her believers, all the prayers and hopes and curses and despair ever uttered in her name.

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.

Ever has common decency paved the way to uncommon folly.

I wished I’d thought of that last before I’d departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites.

It had always irked me that gods never said, “Next Tuesday, Rajit will be struck with boils in his mouth and choke to death.” What good was prophecy if you had to live through the events foretold before you could begin to understand them?

Any cause that requires mockery and abuse to advance itself isn’t one I need to engage with, regardless of my basic beliefs or agreement with the underlying goals.

Building a temple atop a minehead, when the local tulpas haunted the dangerous galleries and tunnels of Below, had not been the wisest judgment ever made. I tried to remember if this had been my idea. Somehow I had the feeling that it was.