112 Quotes by R. Scott Bakker

Why me? A selfish question. Perhaps the most selfish of questions. All burdens, even those as demented as the Apocalypse, must fall upon the shoulders of someone. Why not him?

To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.

Saying ‘I could have done more,’ Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.

It’s the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions.

Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies – words – and so sank or floated with equal ease.

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.

I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world – something I could have fun destroying.