I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.

— Austin Grossman

Austin Grossman Quotes

I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. Like I’d been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid’s face, a naked king with goat’s horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect’s voice.

— Austin Grossman

It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

— Austin Grossman

My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk.

— Austin Grossman

You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that’s where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that’s going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it’s time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly.

— Austin Grossman

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

— Austin Grossman

It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

— Austin Grossman

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.

— Austin Grossman

The people who hired me have been shot. The people who shot them have been shot.

— Austin Grossman

If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and lonely geniuses, the ones who’ve been taught to feel different, or the ones who knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it. There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them.

— Austin Grossman

I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I ddin’t even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn’t allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn’t guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division.

— Austin Grossman

Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.

— Austin Grossman

The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand.

— Austin Grossman

A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.

— Austin Grossman

What does it mean to conquer the world? Is there really a way to do it? Do you have to be the richest one, or the smartest one, or to beat everyone in a fight? Or just know you could? Is it to be invincible? Does it just mean you get the girl you really wanted? Did CoreFire already conquer the world a long time ago? Did I? Or maybe there is no way to do it. No one could have tried harder than I have. Haven’t I already fought a hundred battles, and lost every one? Three.

— Austin Grossman

We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.

— Austin Grossman

Lisa had an engineer’s way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.

— Austin Grossman

They could come after me, I guess, but it doesn’t matter- I’m good at escapes. Maybe into the sewers, like the old days. It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

— Austin Grossman

Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.

— Austin Grossman

If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you’re given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

— Austin Grossman

I may not be smarter than I was last year, but I know more. And I’m certainly no stupider.

— Austin Grossman
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