If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What – oh, what – does that say?
The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.
Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead.
I hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can eat the larvae in them.
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal’s shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.
The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.
Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.
And over it all, the butterflies swarmed, like a million yellow-pettalled flowers dancing on swirling winds.
Kallor said: ‘I walked this land when the T’lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?’ ‘Yes,’ said Caladan Brood, ’you never learn.
One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.
Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.
And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.
First in, Last out. Motto of the bridgeburners.
I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.
What matter the colour of the collar around a man’s neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.
Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that?
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.