The Liar's Key Quotes
"The world is shaped by mankind’s desires and fears. A war of hope against dread, waged upon a substrate that man himself made malleable though he has long forgotten how. All men and all men’s works stand on feet of clay, waiting to be formed and reformed, forged by fear into monsters from the dark core of each soul, waiting to rend the world asunder."
"Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s common sense compressed into its purest form. A lack of it is not a good thing."
"Gods are dull. I’ve stood before the throne. Wodin sits there, old one-eye, with his ravens whispering into each ear."
"It’s a good key. It’s every key. Every key that was and is, every key that will be, every key that could be."
"Your death lies behind one of these other doors, Kelem."
"The world is poisoned. The Day of a Thousand Suns—"
"The stars are pretty but the space between them is infinite and black with promise."
"We kill them where we find them. And any others who make cause with the Drowned Isles."
"All right. You can go. But I'm staying in the boat!"
"Knowing Snorri he’d stand by clapping while the savage carved me up."
"And so we learn that insults are like daggers—it matters which way you point them, and where you stand."
"One great asset in my career as secret coward has been a natural ability to lie fluently in body language."
"I knew his wife. I knew his children, Jal. I bounced them on my knee. They called me ‘uncle.’ If a man can let go of that he can let go of anything . . . and then what point is there to his life, what meaning?"
"Perhaps even the gods themselves lay snared in Loki’s greatest trick and Ragnarok would hear the punch line spoken."
"Friendship, love, trust, childish notions that have left this old woman . . . but, whatever the runes have to say, these are what rule you, Snorri ver Snagason, friendship, love, trust. They’ll drag you into the underworld, or save you from it. One or the other."
"The sea is always changing—but mostly for the worse."
"The creatures of the light wear whatever shapes you let them steal from legend. Beneath it all they are singular in will and no more your friend or guardians than the fire."
"Fire is your enemy, Prince Jalan. Enslave it and it will serve, but give it an inch, give it any opportunity, and you’ll be lucky to escape the burning wreckage of your home."
"The business of raiding for girls of marriageable age seemed something that the people of Trond felt beneath them, but they loved to tell tales about their country bumpkin cousins doing it."
"Insulting each other is a national sport in Norseheim and for the very best results competitors like to call on the old curses of the north, preferably raiding the stock of cruel-things-to-say-about-someone’s-mother that is to be found in the great sagas."
"The closest the Norse came to sweet was leaving the salt out of their ale."
"The key is locking you in to your fate even as it opens every door. The best liars always tell the truth—they just choose which parts."
"Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning."
"Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun."
"To a city man like me there’s something deeply unsettling about being in the middle of nowhere."
"The Vikings had it that the sea held its own god, Aegir, and he had no use for men, taking their ventures upon its surface as impertinence."
"I could have paid a gold crown for just an hour of a summer day in Red March."
"Throwing the first stone… a simple pleasure. Once my life had been one simple pleasure after the next."
"The thing about staying alive is staying useful."
"Hope is almost as bad as fear for goading a man past the point at which he should give up."
"Everything in this world depends upon how you look at it, warrior. Everything is a matter of perspective—a matter of where you stand."
"Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now."
"I have lived a Viking’s life, raw and simple, on the shore of the Uulisk. Battle and clan. Farm and family."
"I cannot say that no hand rests on my shoulder even now—but on the sea, in the wild of the evening storm and the calm of morning, I have looked inside, and if this is not true then I know no true thing."
"The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head."
"What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise."
"The door is everywhere. You just have to know how to see it."
"A different power but in its way more mighty than armies, more insidious than dancing in the dreams of crowned heads."
"There’s no place in this world for me any more, except as a weapon, except as the anger behind a sharp edge, bringing sorrow."
"Sixty beats of a heart would outweigh sixty years in this world without them."
"You’ve not loved, not held your child, newborn and bloody, soft against a hard world, and promised that child you’d keep it safe."
"We win this, or we die. There is no third way."
"The wise come into their majority out in the world, amid the muck and pain of living."
"It doesn’t matter if you win—it only matters that you make a stand."
"Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’"
"The past is a groaning board of mistakes, each a lesson that teaches us how to eat better in the future."
"In the end, we are all just walking stories, and it's the relationships we weave that give us meaning."
"Bravery doesn't always roar. Sometimes bravery is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"
"A man who ignored the borders of Promised Land would find his skin falling off while twisted monsters ate his face."
"The glow of a single candle can defy the darkness, but to hold back the night, we need a blaze."
"To find peace, sometimes you must walk through the storm."
"Magic always struck me as hard and dangerous work... not that there are any words you can put before 'work' that makes it sound attractive. Certainly not 'dangerous' or 'hard.'"
"Each time I trod through the shadows cast by standing stones I heard Aslaug, her message now a simple promise—'I come.'"
"The sun will set soon. We'll make our stand then."
"You should come to Vermillion, Tutt. Fish off the bridge for your living and come out with me of an evening to scandalize the highborn. You’d love it."
"Sounds like any one of these wrong-mages could take the Empire throne and bend the Hundred to his will if their magic is so strong."
"The wrong-mages are bound to the Wheel, and in time it breaks each of them."
"From the runes it seems this arch was an attempt to open the doors to many places where men were not meant to go."
"There’s light that is the warmth and comfort of the first days of summer, then there’s the glare of a desert sun where that light moves from comfort to cruelty."
"The best thing I can say about what followed is that it probably hurt less than being butchered with an axe."
"Myths cast shadows... All the treasures of the sagas cast many shadows and even their shadows can be a deadly weapon."
"I want to take my own share of what you had given to you with your mother’s milk."
"The courts of the Broken Empire are packed with such. I had half-imagined that different forces drove those who toyed with the fabric of the world and dreamed of strange and frightening futures... but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find ambition, the simple greed for power, at the bottom of that too."
"Don’t let the trolls hear you call him a kid. They’ll gobble him up in two bites without even wanting to know who’s trip-trapping over the bridge."
"The trickster. The liar. The thief. Such a one would not let his work fall to the strongest."
"You would be surprised what I can weave from shadow."
"It’s the things in the dark that should be scared of a völva, not the other way around."
"If ever a country needed stabbing, Rhone is it."
"No need to thank me. The Red Queen raised the princes of her house to keep a cool head in a crisis."
"Does a man good to carry his own weight in the world, Jal. It'll harden you up a bit too."
"All the money of Empire flows into Florence, sits a while in the vaults of some or other Florentine banker, then flows out again."
"We think that we don’t grow. But that’s because growth happens so slowly that it’s invisible to us."
"The world's sliding toward a fall. Some of us have been enjoying the ride too much to worry about that drop."
"She made Mother bring me to the other tower. The one where the witch lives. Said she was going to let her touch me again."
"His character is not the issue," Garyus tells her. "Jalan lacks the stability needed for training."
"Sometimes a queen has to be... hard, Jally. Ruling a land is difficult."
"Blood flows along the curves of the script set into the steel."
"Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel."
"Throw away too much of your past and you abandon the person who walked those days."
"What terrifies me, Jal, is that time will blunt the wound."
"Friends are useful. When they stop having something you want—brush them off."
"We build our expectations out of what we know already."
"That’s different," I said. "Don’t be ridiculous. We’re still friends. Who else am I going to pass my card tricks on to?"
"I’m not scared of the pain, though in truth the ache inside is more than I can bear."
"I’ll see the cardinal now. If he’s sober and not abed with some choirboy."
"Our good cardinal should be able to settle the matter of whether I’m dead or not once and for all."
"I’ve always thought I’d make a great uncle. Terrible. But great."
"Magic is a worse drug, its hooks sink deeper."
"The world is broken—each enchantment tears the cracks a little wider."
"Patience is the key. In the end your enemies always come to you."
"If we fail in this. If the change that the Builders set in motion is not arrested, or more likely reversed, if magic runs wild and the worlds crack open, each bleeding into the next . . . then everything is at stake."
"The only way to ensure the unborn’s destruction is to burn out the nest before it realizes that it is under attack."
"The Lady Blue thinks that those steeped deeply enough in their magic will survive the end and find new forms in a new existence."
"I have a duty to my people. I will not allow this to happen."
"True, the passage of five decades and more beneath the Red March sun had sunk her flesh about her bones, scorched her skin into tight wrinkles, but the same ruthless calculation lay behind her eyes."
"Let he that is without sin cast the first stone . . ."
"The prodigal son had been feasted and celebrated on his return, despite being a waste of space."
"Anyone with business interests knows old Kelem. Not so many years ago it might just as well have been his face on every coin of Empire."
"They call him the father of the banking clans, but if a father lives too long his children are apt to turn on him."
"Not even death could keep me from your hospitality, Marco!"