Top 100 Glen Cook Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “My guess is, six of one, half a dozen of the other. Crows.”

— Glen Cook

53. “Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?”

— Glen Cook

54. “Early birds. Let ’em eat worms.”

— Glen Cook

55. “No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.”

— Glen Cook

56. “Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.”

— Glen Cook

57. “We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.”

— Glen Cook

58. “A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.”

— Glen Cook

59. “Something he had heard some wise man say. About the three stages of empire, the three generations. First came the conquerers, unstoppable in war. Then came the administrators, who bound it all together into one apparently unshakable, immortal edifice. Then came the wasters, who knew no responsibility and squandered the capital of their inheritance upon whims and vices. And fell to other conquerers.”

— Glen Cook

60. “Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.”

— Glen Cook

61. “The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.”

— Glen Cook

62. “I am a haunted man. I am haunted by the Limper’s screams. I am haunted by the Lady’s laughter. I am haunted by my suspicion that we are furthering the cause of something that deserves to be scrubbed from the face of the earth. I am haunted by the conviction that those bent upon the Lady’s eradication are little better than she. I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.”

— Glen Cook

63. “I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams.”

— Glen Cook

64. “I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world.”

— Glen Cook

65. “Limper flopped violently. The gag flew out of his mouth. His ankle bonds parted. He gained his feet, tried to run, tried to mouth some spell that would protect him. He had gone thirty feet when a thousand fiery snakes streaked out of the night and swarmed him. They covered his body. They slithered into his mouth and nose, into his eyes and ears. They went in the easy way and came gnawing out through his back and chest and belly. And he screamed. And screamed. And screamed.”

— Glen Cook

66. “The age is sorrowfully short of characters of the magnificently villainous vitality of those the Dominator took in olden times: Soulcatcher, the Hanged Man, Nightcrawler, Shapeshifter, the Limper, and such. Those were nastymen of the grand scope, nearly as wild and hairy in their wickedness as the Lady and Dominator themselves.”

— Glen Cook

67. “I have been told I always look at the dark underbelly of tomorrow. Possibly. You’re less likely to be disappointed that way.”

— Glen Cook

68. “Ah, the smell of mystery and dark doings, of skulduggery and revenge. The meat of a good tale.”

— Glen Cook

69. “I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled towards absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks.”

— Glen Cook

70. “I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive.”

— Glen Cook

71. “I snuck a glance at her. She wore a teasing little smile. I shifted my attention to the fighting. What she did to me, just sitting there, amidst the fury of the end of the world, was more frightening than the prospect of a death in battle. I am too old to boil like a horny fifteen-year-old.”

— Glen Cook

72. “If brains were glazier’s putty, he couldn’t weatherproof a windowless room.”

— Glen Cook

73. “Wars are being fought every day, even where armies are not on the march. And wars within wars. And wars behind wars.”

— Glen Cook

74. “What did we do today to frighten the world?”

— Glen Cook

75. “An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. “I am a soldier.” I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy’s own Dejagoran dialect. “I’ve been distracted before. I’m still alive.”

— Glen Cook

76. “But maybe there is a force for greater good, created by our unconscious minds conjoined, that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts.”

— Glen Cook

77. “The Hanged Man stopped gesturing and struck a pose: man listening.”

— Glen Cook

78. “Part of winning is a downdeep certainty that, no matter how bad things look, a road to victory will open.”

— Glen Cook

79. “This is a favorite game, matching wits with a Raker. He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another.”

— Glen Cook

80. “One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.”

— Glen Cook

81. “Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.”

— Glen Cook

82. “He’d described himself as looking like a child molester waiting for a chance to strike. He wasn’t comfortable with his appearance.”

— Glen Cook

83. “I was suspicious immediately. Be abidingly suspicious of any teenage male who is mannerly, respectful, and absent attitude. That kid is up to something. Guaranteed.”

— Glen Cook

84. “None of us are going to get out of this alive so we might as well grab a laugh while we can.”

— Glen Cook

85. “Singed,” he said, assuming that air of phony dignity cats adopt after some particularly inept performance. Something like, “That’s what I meant to do all along.”

— Glen Cook

86. “Raven is an asset in any game including One-Eye. One-Eye cheats. But never when Raven is playing.”

— Glen Cook

87. “I’m going to adopt you. You’d make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?” Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, “I think she’s right.” “Excellent! Let’s go ask your wicked future mother’s opinion.” We.”

— Glen Cook

88. “I am a haunted man. I am haunted by the Limper’s screams. I am haunted by the Lady’s laughter.”

— Glen Cook

89. “It was a night for screamers. A broiling, sticky night of the sort that abrades that last thin barrier between the civilized man and the monster crouched in his soul.”

— Glen Cook

90. “Let’s say the madonnas of the night in Elm were severely disappointed in the Black Company.”

— Glen Cook

91. “My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion.”

— Glen Cook

92. “Its front sags against its neighbor to the right, clinging for support like one of its own drunken patrons.”

— Glen Cook

93. “Over coming days, when I sneaked down to the Buskin, he revealed everything recorded where he appears as the focal character. I do not think I have met many men who disgusted me more. Nastier.”

— Glen Cook

94. “There was no peace inside the bounds spanned by God’s Peace. Because men did not just demand submission to the Will of God, they demanded submission to themselves. Nor could they agree what the Will of God might be.”

— Glen Cook

95. “A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.”

— Glen Cook

96. “In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.”

— Glen Cook

97. “Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.”

— Glen Cook

98. “An army without faith in itself is beaten more surely than an army defeated in battle.”

— Glen Cook

99. “The books must be written. The truth must be recorded even if fate decrees that no man ever reads a word I write. The Annals are the soul of the Black Company. They recall that this is who we are. That this is who we were. That we persevere. And that treachery, as it ever has, failed to suck the last drop of our blood.”

— Glen Cook

100. “A man lay before me. He had sunk as low as any I had ever known. Then he had fought his way back and back and had become worthy. A man far better than I, for he had located his moral pole star and set his course by it though it had cost his life.”

— Glen Cook