«Полкороля» kitabından alıntılar, sayfa 6

--- great warriors die no better than other men.

And usually sooner.

‘Glorious victories make fine songs, Yarvi, but inglorious ones are no worse once the bards are done with them. Glorious defeats, meanwhile, are just defeats.’

People fight hardest when they have no way out.

'Sometimes, might be is the best you can hope for.'

The food of fear is ignorance, Mother Gundring used to say. The death of fear is knowledge.

When you are chained beside a man and share his food and his misfortune, share the blows of the overseer and the buffets of Mother Sea, match your rhythm to his as you heave at the same great beam, huddle together in the icy night or face the careless cold alone - that is when you come to know a man.

So Yarvi squatted in that unbearable squalor, and found it was amazing what a man could get used to.---

---Strange, how quickly a king could become an animal. Or half a king half an animal. Perhaps even those we raise highest never get that far above mud.

He had to find a way to win. There is always a way, his mother used to tell him.

But despite his undoubted gifts of a quick mind, empathy, and a fine singing voice, he could not think of one.

'The muscle-smothered fools are harder to ignore when you're in the square with them.'

'You can't be sure.'

'It is a minister's place always to doubt---'

'But always to seem certain,' he finished for her.