“He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.””

— Glen Cook, book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 8, “Taglios: Trouble Follows” (p. 389)

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American fiction writer 1944

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