Listen close and you can hear, Please, bless us and forgive us, and make us good here and strong here. Let us get along here. Let those we love and left behind be blessed. Let us find the proper path and keep to it. Help us act harmoniously, and find work pleasing in the sight of god and man.
Janet MorrisSo well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him I fought beside you.
Janet MorrisIn every age he had ever studied, doomsayers abounded. No millennium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.
Janet MorrisBe polite to all, friendly to none. Be professional. Be ready to kill everyone and everything.
Janet MorrisWhen I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear.
Janet MorrisWe fouled up. I did. He got hurt. Badly, maybe. And the god...is not helping him today.
Janet MorrisLoyalty must be forged - to him, to his: stronger than iron, from experience, from risk - it can't be bought, or taught, or promised before the fact. Allegiance must be earned so it will hold, win or lose.
Janet MorrisGods colliding, ethos and mythos trying to combine. The Sacred Band caught up in a whirlwind not of any god's devising: he and Niko had wanted to save twenty-three pairs of fated Theban fighters. Now everything feels fated and fighting oversweeps its boundaries of time and place and plane.
Janet MorrisIn this new world, this day and forever, then, we are not only Thebans - we are all Stepsons. We are all one Sacred Band. If you will have us. And mine will fight by yours, henceforth, as brothers.
Janet MorrisBandara was not an easy place to return to: it could hide from the common worlds whose periphery it inhabited. But Bandara never had, in all its years, completely disappeared.
Janet MorrisThis was what men fought for, what men died for: a chance at life, and to fight on other days - the battle of your choice, of the body, or the heart, or the soul.
Janet MorrisThe heavens listen to what is said on these cobbles. Laws of man and nature come together here. Here you must be firm. Here you must be true.
Janet MorrisStrife brings all things into being on her battlefield. This I know. I have been there many times," says Vashanka, lord of sack and pillage. "I have died before.
Janet MorrisOnly from chaos does order come. The angry Fates bring death where they will, when war is king, says Enlil, storm god of the armies, and the tip of his crown rends the clouds above their heads. "Wheresoever I rule, death comes shambling after. So it has always been, is, and will be."
Janet MorrisReasons never matter, once Death comes cold and bold and takes the living by the hand. You count up your dead, every one.
Janet MorrisGods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible.
Janet Morris