Quotes from book
Water Sleeps

Water Sleeps
Glen Cook

Water Sleeps is the eighth 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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“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 87 (p. 314)

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“The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 32 (p. 121)

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“Desperate people will do what they must to survive. Only a fool would expect the results to be pretty.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 6 (p. 31)

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“Sadly, after years of study, I realize that most history may pivot on personal considerations like that, not on the pursuit of ideals dark or shining.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 5 (p. 22)

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“Time is the most wicked of all villains.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 5 (p. 25)

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“Like most villains, he was wicked only most of the time and mainly in small-minded ways.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 7 (p. 34)

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“The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. But Fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess.
When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man can conjure simply by existing.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 55)

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“Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 60 (p. 212; repeated on p. 356)

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“I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 91 (p. 328)

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“Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said—particularly if it bore any vaguely education hue—was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 4 (p. 18)

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“I sped a prayer heavenward. God needs to be reminded.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 75 (p. 265)

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““We’re still the Black Company. We still don’t leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coinage itself says bad money will drive out good. The same is true of principles, ethics and rules of conduct. If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possible remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 72 (pp. 255-256)

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“You might have noticed that the human animal is fond of forming and clinging to prejudices, remaining their steadfast curator in the face of all reason and contradiction.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 42 (p. 155)

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“That was not supposed to happen. It was unthinkable, supposedly. And for ordinary people that was mostly true. But not so at a level where men began to believe that they existed outside the usual rules.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 28 (pp. 107-108)

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“Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 96 (p. 348)

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““When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.”
Santaraksita smiled sourly, “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.”
He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
And that is a truth upon which you can rely.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 97 (pp. 351-352)

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“You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 83 (p. 298)

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“Beneath my breath I continued my conversation with God. As usual, He did not trouble Himself to defend His Works to me. My fault for being a woman.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 84 (p. 302)

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“Not dangerous at all. Not even that lucky. But a sufficiently paranoid mind will discern patterns and threats where only fortune has conspired.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 30 (p. 112)

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“And there went some good old-fashioned wishful thinking, Sleepy. We were talking about human beings. If there is any way to be contrary, unreasonable and obnoxious, human beings are sure to find and pursue it. With verve and enthusiasm at whatever might be the most inconvenient time.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 85 (p. 308)

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