Top 80 K.J. Parker Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “He looked at me the way the male spider gazes at his beloved. He knows he’s going to get eaten afterwards, but it’ll be worth it. “Deal,” he said.”

— K.J. Parker

52. “To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He’d have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?”

— K.J. Parker

53. “It was as though the Gods had dropped something – a comb, a hairpin, a needle – and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us – Excuse me. It was an impressive sight.”

— K.J. Parker

54. “It’s like – all right, supposing there’s a fire. What do you do? You grab everyone and everything you can and you get the hell out of there. You don’t agonise about letting the fire win. Staying alive doesn’t make you the fire’s accomplice.”

— K.J. Parker

55. “Great art, I’ve always felt, is like a pearl; thousands of layers of creativity and sensibility built up around an inner core of money.”

— K.J. Parker

56. “Bloody doctor hadn’t got there yet; if he’d been there, I’d have smashed his face in for not being there yet – which is how your mind works when you’re in that sort of a state.”

— K.J. Parker

57. “I like to let them talk things out, but fact isn’t a democratic process; if a thing isn’t true it isn’t true, even if everybody votes that it is.”

— K.J. Parker

58. “Being dead is bad enough. Being dead and still having to walk around and eat is so much worse.”

— K.J. Parker

59. “An old man I met in the slave camp told me once, always be positive. He died of gangrene, something it’s hard to be positive about, and he spent his last week on earth whimpering, but I’ve always tried to follow his advice, even so.”

— K.J. Parker

60. “And oftentimes, to bring us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths.”

— K.J. Parker

61. “Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?”

— K.J. Parker

62. “There was once a king in a far-off land who said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

— K.J. Parker

63. “Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.”

— K.J. Parker

64. “You can lead the people to water, but you can’t make them think. Nobody, it seems, can do that.”

— K.J. Parker

65. “The past would be useful if you could use it like that, as a place where you could bury dead bodies, shovelling this convenient loss of memory into the grave to cover up their faces. That’s not what the past was for, though. It was where the present went to rot down, so you could use it to grow the future. He smiled; nice piece of imagery, but it was too glib to fool anyone.”

— K.J. Parker

66. “Moral: don’t play with savage things that are stronger than you are.”

— K.J. Parker

67. “You remember the old parable about the holy prophet who got thrown into the lions’ den. I felt like a lone lion in a den of prophets.”

— K.J. Parker

68. “The truth, I’ve found, is like an annoying little dog that takes a fancy to you in the street and follows you home, barking. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been glad to be confronted with the truth.”

— K.J. Parker

69. “Still, and even so; if it’s a choice between lions and wolves and jackals and foxes, give me lions any day. You can’t ever justify what they do, but they’ve got style.”

— K.J. Parker

70. “There’s nothing quite like the scriptures for killing faith stone dead. Actually reading them and thinking about what they said evaporated my belief like spit on a hot stove.”

— K.J. Parker

71. “Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.”

— K.J. Parker

72. “Ah well. He’d beaten her twice sind then: once on their honeymoon, though he still suspected her of throwing the game, and once on the day she lost the baby. And two out of eight hundred and six wasn’t too bad, against such an opponent.”

— K.J. Parker

73. “Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.”

— K.J. Parker

74. “My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things.”

— K.J. Parker

75. “The more she sticks the knife in, the more I resent it, the less I actually think about what she’s been saying. That, of course, presupposes that the object of the exercise from her point of view is to change my mind about what I’m doing, as opposed to beating me to a pulp.”

— K.J. Parker

76. “They’ve heard of sequential numbering in Supply but clearly aren’t convinced that it’d work, so Block 374 is wedged in between Blocks 217 and 434.”

— K.J. Parker

77. “He stared at the coin in his hand, then at me. Then he ran. I’ve seen men running for their lives, but he was faster. Incentive is everything.”

— K.J. Parker

78. “Comedy to observers, tragedy to participants; I consider myself an observer. I fly over my life like a migrating bird, and I only ever play for beans or counters, never for real money.”

— K.J. Parker

79. “Like I said, I’m a disappointment to her. She wanted me to be a murderer and an extortionist, like my father.”

— K.J. Parker

80. “My guess is, they couldn’t sleep, and they had the kind of generous nature that reckons insomnia isn’t something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.”

— K.J. Parker

81. “I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.”

— K.J. Parker

82. “And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can’t do anything about. You can’t make it come if you want it, and you can’t make it go if you don’t.”

— K.J. Parker

83. “I had my pick of three. Never ceases to amaze me, the insane things people will do for money.”

— K.J. Parker

84. “Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.”

— K.J. Parker

85. “There’s smart, and there’s smart enough.”

— K.J. Parker

86. “I gather you play chess, he’d said, and she’d given him a look, later he’d ralised it was fair warning; yes, she played chess. The had a mignificent coral and ivory set, worth a thousand acres of good arable land. He’d made soft opening, the way you do when you’re playing a girl, and suddenly he found himself staring defeat in the facs – he’d never los a game except three times, to Senza.”

— K.J. Parker

87. “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.”

— K.J. Parker