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.
I have to feel what I’m writing, right down to the core.
For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.
Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love all manner of sacrifice could be borne.
Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.
Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things – once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.
Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?