Top 100 Glen Cook Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.”

— Glen Cook

Featured in: Good Morning Quotes, Monday Quotes

2. “More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.”

— Glen Cook

3. “I’m an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.”

— Glen Cook

Featured in: Romance Quotes

4. “Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.”

— Glen Cook

5. “Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.”

— Glen Cook

6. “Time will unfold its leaves.”

— Glen Cook

7. “Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”

— Glen Cook

8. “Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you’re glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.”

— Glen Cook

9. “There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.”

— Glen Cook

10. “There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.”

— Glen Cook

11. “Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of “somedays.” Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English.”

— Glen Cook

12. “Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.”

— Glen Cook

13. “No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our only mourners. It is the Company against the world. Thus it has been and ever will be.”

— Glen Cook

14. “The only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions.”

— Glen Cook

15. “When I reflect on my companions’ inner natures I usually wish I controlled one small talent. I wish I could look inside them and unmask the darks and brights that move them. Then I take a quick look into the jungle of my own soul and thank heaven that I cannot. Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.”

— Glen Cook

16. “Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.”

— Glen Cook

17. “There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.”

— Glen Cook

18. “I’m a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.”

— Glen Cook

19. “You will find, as you mature, that most people are weak. And lazy. Weak, lazy people whine and complain. Otherwise, they would have to take a risk to make things right. And the wrong they suffer often don’t need righting because they exist only inside their minds.”

— Glen Cook

20. “Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.”

— Glen Cook

21. “A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse.”

— Glen Cook

22. “An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronising wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.”

— Glen Cook

23. “The Dead Man once told me that monsters aren’t born, they’re made. That they are memorials which take years of cruelty to sculpt. And that while we should weep for the tortured child who served as raw material, we should permit no sentiment to impede us while we rid the world of the terror strewn by the finished work. It took me a while to figure out what he meant but I do understand him now.”

— Glen Cook

24. “Oh, ’twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.”

— Glen Cook

25. “We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair.”

— Glen Cook

26. “Back to the company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to the annals. Back to fear.”

— Glen Cook

27. “Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The.”

— Glen Cook

28. “Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.”

— Glen Cook

29. “Bragging is how criminals get caught and men with deep secrets deliver themselves to their enemies. It’s bonehead human nature. We all want to look special. Knowing something is one of the best ways.”

— Glen Cook

30. “The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn’t get.”

— Glen Cook

31. “If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possibly remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.”

— Glen Cook

32. “Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.”

— Glen Cook

33. “I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.”

— Glen Cook

34. “These boys both fell out of the ugly tree at a young age, hitting every damned branch on the way down. Then their mommas whupped them with an ugly stick and fed them ugly soup every day of their lives. They were Uh-glee, with a couple of capital double-ugs.”

— Glen Cook

35. “Evil is relative, Annalist. You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.”

— Glen Cook

36. “Little girls are twice as precious and innocent as little boys. I do not know a culture that does not make them that way.”

— Glen Cook

37. “One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.”

— Glen Cook

38. “One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid. Death is the only exorcism.”

— Glen Cook

39. “Closer at hand, the wheeling gulls were as surly and lackadaisical as the day promised to make most men.”

— Glen Cook

40. “If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.”

— Glen Cook

41. “Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”

— Glen Cook

42. “We gathered our things and began taking leave of camp followers who had trickled out from the city. Our animals and equipment would be their reward for faith and friendship. I spent a sad, gentle hour with a woman to whom I meant more than I suspected. We shed no tears and told one another no lies. I left her with memories and most of my pathetic fortune. She left me with a lump in my throat and a sense of loss not wholly fathomable.”

— Glen Cook

43. “The only characters I’ve made to resemble real people have been grotesques.”

— Glen Cook

44. “I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.”

— Glen Cook

45. “He surveyed his audience with that look of sublime solemnity only a drunk can muster.”

— Glen Cook

46. “One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight. Lightning.”

— Glen Cook

47. “The Lady made a few gestures around Bomanz – who looked pretty moth-eaten – and said a few words in a language I did not understand. Why do sorcerers always use languages nobody understands? Even Goblin and One-Eye do it. Each has confided that he cannot follow the tongue the other uses. Maybe they make it up?”

— Glen Cook

48. “My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.”

— Glen Cook

49. “There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints.”

— Glen Cook

50. “I am not religious. I cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity’s frothy carryings-on. I mean, logically, beings of that order just wouldn’t.”

— Glen Cook