R. Scott Bakker Quotes

The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?

Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.

Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.

Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?

We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.

It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.

To know the world will never be so bad.

Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need - to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.

Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.

Gods are but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?

I remeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visable.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things-all things!-but only so long as it remains invisible.

There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.

Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.

Something ... made him feel small, not in the way of orphans or beggars or children, but in a good way. In the way of souls.

Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly - only varieties of sorrow.