THE BLINDING KNIFE - BRENT WEEKS

The Blinding Knife - Pg 518

   The screams of the furious and the shouts of anger and the moans of the injured and the cries of urgent orders and the crackling of fireballs and the snapping of distant muskets and booms of cannons and the whistle of the big mortars and the snap of the sails and the wash of the waves and the hissing of the wind and the moans of the dying and the shrieks of the wights faded, grew distant, hushed. Kip could hear only the deep, slow whoosh of his own heartbeat, ludicrously slow, and around and beneath that a sighing, like the beach when the tide goes out. For a moment, he had a wild notion that he was hearing the sunlight hit the waves. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 431

   Oh, Orholam have mercy. Gavin had murdered that stupid girls cause she'd insulted Karris? Karris felt like weeping, for Ana, for herself, for Gavin, for the whole stupid world and shipwrecked love.  

The Blinding Knife - Pg 338

   "You make it sound so simple, and empty."

   "Evil is simple and empty. Evil has no mysterious depths. We stare into a dark hole and fill it with our fears, but it is only a hole."

The Blinding Knife - Pg 333

   "Freedom isn't the highest good. Power is. For without power, your freedom can be taken." He smiled again. It was a hard smile, but this was a hard world.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 332

   "Might doesn't make right. Might makes reality." He stared at the corregidor for long enough to drop the weight of certainty on the boy, then turned and looked at the women and children. His gaze was sad but resolute. He would march these people to their deaths to shield his own people's lives, and he would blame the corregidor for it. 

   If it was a bluff, it was as brassy a bluff as Liv had ever seen. But she didn't think it was a bluff. Neither, she could tell, did the corregidor. His face slowly worked through horror, revulsion, astonishment, and finally resignation. He wasn't facing a man, he was facing a force of nature. There was no reasoning with a cyclone, no pleading with a hurricano. You batten down the hatches and ride it out, praying you survive.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 328

   Zymun's flirtation was the flirtation of possibility. She had only to say the word, just once, one night when he came by her tent and asked politely if he could come in. That she could say yes, that none would stop her, that none would even question her was more of an erotic charge than that she could say yes to Zymun in particular, dashing as he was. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 321

   "The pagans believed in separate gods, as you know. Either real, living entities that required their sacrifices and could be wooed by human gifts or, as other pagans believed, simply as facets of humanity itself--as greed is part of each of us, or ambition, or passion--they believed the gods should be acknowledged only for how they revealed truths about our own souls.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 320

   "You haven't known me for three months, and you've just handed four great treasures into my hands. I could take them from you now and have you thrown out. I could buy myself a satrap's seat with what you've got. You think I'm immune? You think I'm too good a man to do that?" 

   "Yes, sir," Kip said.

   "But you don't know."

   "A man's got to act without knowing everything, or he'll never do anything,"

   Commander Ironfist's lip twitched. "So you're a man now?"

   "I've taken lives, and I've taken my own life in my hands and trusted a friend with it. Yes, sir, I'd say that makes me a man." 

   "Neither makes me a man. The first makes you a killer. The second makes you a fool. Either may get you killed."

The Blinding Knife - Pg 291

   Usef and I had fought on opposite sides of the Prisms' War, the False Prisms' War, the War of the Guiles. One of my best friends from the Chromeria killed Usef's first wife. And Usef had killed her in turn. Usef and I had ample reason to hate each other. Instead, we'd fallen in love. Two broken warriors tired of war.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 257

   The Prism was a peerless warrior, and slaughter, too, is the necessary work of war. He was a tireless worker, circling, circling, like a buzzard. He circled until there was no more shrieking, until there was no more hatred, until crimson blood no longer sluiced from the pure yellow decks of his a skimmer, until the full harvest of death was brought to hell's gates.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 257

He could hear the wights' keening shrieks. Fury, from the depths of the supposedly purely rational blues. Fury that a man could best their blue perfection, fury that they could be wrong. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 253

   The twelve pillars were each three paces tall. As Gavin approached the nearest, he saw inside it the most perfectly formed blue wight that he'd ever encountered. It had fully sloughed off its human skin. In its place was a woven tapestry of gems, the weaves themselves altering for exactly how much motion the muscles beneath demanded of the skin at each point. It was terribly beautiful, like someone had painted a masterpiece with blood.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 240

 Two students had left after speaking with their sponsors about the impending war, but only two. Teia was proud of that; she was also keenly aware that being proud of ignoramuses who had no idea what they were getting into was probably silly.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 238

   My men throw the captain and his brother over the side. They land with a huge splash, and bob to the surface by the buoyancy of the barrels, but then roll underneath the water by them. Have to fight to breathe, as do we all, every day.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 221

   What's the endgame, Rossie? Sure, the Guiles nearly rule the world, but Prisms don't last forever. Your family's almost gone. What do you want? 

   Maybe Andross Guile had been scheming so long that he didn't know how to not scheme. Maybe there was no winning, and he knew it, but losing was definitely possible, and his pride wouldn't allow him to lose. So he'd fight and fight and tear down a hundred other families and keep clawing until they finally nailed shut his crypt. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 207

   There was some corner of dread turning over in his soul. She turned her eyes on him, and his heart flipped over and convulsed, tried to crawl off the squeaky clean floor to the stairs, its palpitations making it hop like a deranged bunny, the worst escape attempt in history. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 199

   "Karris doesn't like to be left behind when I head into danger."

   "You've brought me fifty thousand problems, Lord Prism. That, however, is not one of them."

The Blinding Knife - Pg 173

   Dawn was a relief of the only kind he now knew: a move from one kind of fight to another. He got up to fill another day. If he was busy enough, he wouldn't have time to think.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 142

   "Have you ever realized that everything you ever believed was a lie?"

   "Everything? The sky is green now?"

   "I didn't mean--"

   "Teasing, child." The old woman paused, then heaved a little sigh of her own. "I believed my husband was faithful to me. When that fell, it seemed like all the world did with it."

   Liv hesitated.

   "No, child. Don't tell me. I'm a stranger. Take my kindness, but don't trust so much, so easily. You're a beautiful young woman in a perilous place. Put on some armor. Just remember what's armor and what's you, so when it's time to take it off, you can."