83 Quotes by K.J. Parker

But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth.

I've always had this theory, that we're all born with a certain optimum age, the age we're really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I've always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.

That’s the thing,” she said. “You add on getting rid of starvation and poverty like it’s a fringe benefit. Like the slice of lemon you get with a plate of whitebait.” He laughed. “That’s why I succeed,” he said, “where the men with beautiful souls always fail. If you walk through the market asking the stallholders to give you a slice of lemon for free, they’d laugh in your face. Pay for the whitebait and you get a good meal of whitebait for your money, plus the free lemon.

I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it.

Bir şeyi yapmanın en çabuk, en kolay ve en ucuz yolu ilk seferinde düzgün yapmaktır.

Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case.

And lies, of course - It's like astronomy, I always say. Clever fellows, the astronomers, they can tell ever such a lot about something they can't see by the shadow it casts over something they can. Same with lies. The shape of a lie will often give you the truth.

I take the view that we’re the sum of everything that happens to us, good and bad. It’s an alchemist’s interpretation, of course, seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even if, particularly if, it’s unstable or noxious, you get a different result.

Ladies from fine old Imperial families shouldn’t sleep in tents and shit in ditches. Exactly what they were supposed to do all day nobody had quite figured out yet; be put away in cupboards when not in use seemed to be the prevailing opinion.