Quotes from book
Bleak Seasons

Bleak Seasons
Glen Cook

Bleak Seasons is the sixth novel in Glen Cook's ongoing series, The Black Company. The series combines elements of epic fantasy and dark fantasy as it follows an elite mercenary unit, The Black Company, through roughly forty years of its approximately four hundred-year history.

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“I heard Mather’s blather but it did not register as sense. I uttered, “Tooga ain’t no crazier than any other religion around here.”
That seemed to offend everyone equally.
Good.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 86 (p. 236)

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“Man, woman and child, the people of Shadowcatch were privy to the one true secret of the universe: there is always a darker shadow lurking beyond the one whose face you can see.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 35 (p. 108)

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“The poor idiot is a living testimonial to the fact that everything takes longer and costs more. Even magic can’t get you around that.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 91 (p. 250)

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““She was stronger than the gods who created her?”
“Guys, I didn’t make this stuff up. Don’t ask me to rationalize it. Goblin, you’ve been everywhere. You ever seen a religion that can’t be picked to shreds by any nonbeliever with brains enough to tie his own bootlaces?”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 42 (p. 120)

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“The sky? Dark as the inside of a priest’s heart, isn’t it?”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 20 (p. 55)

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“The world sure isn’t kind to the man who tries to be gentle and thoughtful.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 40 (p. 113)

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“Ever since childhood I have suspected you get along better if you respect people’s ways and wishes regardless of your apparent relative strengths.
That doesn’t mean you let people walk on you. It doesn’t mean you eat their pain for them. You need to demand respect for yourself, too.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 67)

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“Fickle folk. A little hunger and stress and they forgot all about liberty.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 71 (p. 197)

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“Rage is a red, near-animate force, as bloated with compassion as a starving serpent.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 101 (p. 270)

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“I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of them was ingenious to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and female do.
But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from the same dichotomy.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 98 (p. 266)

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“It is a chance to flit off and double-check my memory, which I have found to be astonishingly unreliable.
Apparently none of us really remember anything exactly the way it happened. And often the divergence is proportional to the amount of ego and wishful thinking we have invested.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 90 (p. 243)

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“And there is no time. There is a war on.
Always there is a war on.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 1 (pp. 9-10)

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“Those soldiers hacked and slashed. Their faces were distorted with the horror of their actions but they were out of control, far past the point where they could stop. The flicker of firelight made everything seem more hellish and surreal.
I had seen this before. I had seen my own brothers this way, a few times, back in the north. The blood smell takes control and kills the mind and deadens the soul and there is nothing human left.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 71 (p. 197)

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“For once he was as serious as a spear through the gut.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 66 (p. 187)

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“You can blame a wizard for anything and people will believe you.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 77 (p. 212)

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“I guess you don’t need to agree on everything to be lovers.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 31 (p. 87)

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“Like most warlords he doesn’t let reality get in the way of his doing whatever he wants to do.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 5 (p. 19)

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“You are a hired sword. A soldier. You should not be playing philosophical games. Not even with yourself.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 98 (p. 266)

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“He talks big about his goddess getting involved but I won’t count on that. I’ve never seen the gods actually take a hand in mortal affairs.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 51 (p. 152)

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