112 Quotes by R. Scott Bakker

Despite all the pain, all the wrenching loss, there is no greater glory than a complicated life.

Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.

If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us.

To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.

He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.

You realized those truths that cut against the interests of the powerful were called lies, and that those lies that served those interests were called truths.

The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation.

Power does not make safe. History murders the children of weak rulers.

Where hopes burn bright,” he said, “patience is quickly consumed.