Empress of Forever Quotes

“Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“We learn systems so we may learn ourselves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge--but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our our minds, we can break ourselves.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“You’re not who you think you are,” Viv said. “You’re a dream. That’s all. But don’t take it too hard. So are the rest of us.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“To live is to grow secrets.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Anger’s hotter than a star, and endures where stars do not.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Learn so you can work. Practice so you can play. Follow so you can lead. No one stays who she is forever.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“We study machines, and train our mind to mirror them. This ship holds many systems: Cloud engines interlace with crude chemical and subspace drives. We learn systems so we may learn our selves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge—but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our own minds, we can break ourselves.” “Why would we—sorry, why would you want that?” “Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.” She recognized that line, handed down however many millennia.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“A grin, Zanj had always felt personally, was more a state of mind than a set of the lips.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Zanj chose her words like an old woman crossing ice might choose her steps—Viv almost believed she was really so lost and alone.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“She had never been weak enough to need meanness.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“But you don’t change, or learn, or offer. You’re just you, always. You didn’t need me. And when you get where you’re going, you’ll leave, without a thought for what remains behind.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Magda had always understood Viv, even at school when there was barely any Viv to know yet, just a passel of immature reflexes drawn from her parents, her grandma’s cultural revolution horror stories, and the science-fiction section of the public library.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Home is a dream, and only dreams survive on dreams alone. The real world takes real work.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“do you just throw atomic bombs out the back and hope for the best?”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Viv tried not to look. She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.

She recognized that line, handed down however many millennia. She'd never thought of it like that before: the mind as a computer, sure, but she'd lost track of the number of times some reported made that analogy, but the self as a proprietary system, what would that imply? Your desires, your thoughts no more your own than a system's pre-programmed behavior belonged to it? But if your thoughts weren't you, what was? Or was that even the right question?”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“She sounded like Tom Waits had a baby with Tom Waits.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“none of the weird-physics inversion a contained color bomb would leave.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“The crowns trap our selves. They carve us off from the world. But what is the self? There are pieces of me in all of you, and pieces of you in me. We are all empty of inherent form. Trace the threads of each of us, and you find not just the others, but the entire universe. And what crown could bind the whole universe?”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“You didn’t grow past the old things, just enclosed them like rings in a tree, so someone feeling the bark of you could suss out your old scars.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“She had weapons here, a plan, a place to stand and a lever long enough to move the world. But worlds were big things, heavy, round, and once they started to move, they rolled with crushing force and did not stop no matter how many bodies lay across their path.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“The stars had failed and in the morning mist she could not tell sea from sky. If the world were as magic as it used to feel, she could just swim out until the out turned into up and the up to upside down, and tread water and raise her eyes to see this scrap of shoreline overhead, and with it all she meant to leave behind.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“With a thousand thousand eyes she stared out through the Cloud, and flexed a thousand thousand limbs. There was pain, yes, she’d forgotten the fullness of the pain—but there was joy, too, far worse. She wanted the pain to stop, and it did—Groundswell just reached inside her, obedient to her will, and turned the pain receptors off. Its systems embraced her, planet-shattering vast, obedient to her will. It needed her to want things. It needed her will to shape its own, to give its weaponized hulk frame and purpose. She was a girl in a palace, empty and immense, and when she shouted, invisible hands answered her every command. But no matter how she ran, she never reached the walls, and if she demanded a door, it only opened into the palace once again.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever