The crime contains its own punishment.
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
Some people are monsters, they're evil through and through; you tell yourself that so you can make sense of the world. It's like believing in a religion, a god and a devil, all good on one side, all bad on the other. But that's not how it is. Instead, you've got people who are capable of doing things that you can't even bear to think about; for bloody certain you can't ever forgive them. But they can still feel guilt and shame, they can still fall in love, try and do the right thing, appreciate what the right thing is--and then they cheerfully go and do the next unbelievably bad thing, and it all goes round again.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
War is a complex mechanism, whose escapement is the battle, whose function is to produce nothing but waste; as if you peeled apples to get the peel and the core, and threw the fruit away.
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
The son of a powerful, uneducated man has a hard time of it, shouldering the burden of all the advantages his father managed so well without.
K. J. PARKER, Devices and Desires
That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
Love is basically for teenagers, and when it comes to real life for grown-ups, you're far better off with someone who's moderately pleased to see you when you're around, but leaves you in peace when you've got things to do.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
If you change yourself in order to achieve something, you distort the objective.
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
The enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible.
K. J. PARKER, Devices and Desires
Savages and primitives believed in books that could suck your soul out through your eyes as you read them, books that could wrap their pages around your head and swallow you, words that crawled into your brain like tapeworms.
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
War is a curious sort of reciprocal mirror. We never see the slaughter and injury our shot causes, only the results of the inevitable retaliation. Hardly any wonder, therefore, that we fall into the error of believing that it's the enemy who are to blame, rather than ourselves.
K. J. PARKER, The Escapement
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