Petrik > Books: favorites‎ (208)

“That was the thing about omens—they were made up. Imagined signals of something nebulous. So why not make them up to be something positive?”

“Everyone else pranced around without ever having to worry they were a burden to others. Never remaining in the same place—when they longed to move around—because they didn’t want it to be a bother. They didn’t know what they had. But Rysn knew exactly what she’d lost.”

“But it’s nice to make people laugh at you for something you do, and not something you can’t control. You know?”

“You could always defeat gloomy Passions with optimism and determination. Even the worst highstorm dropped fresh water.”

“Sometimes you need to accept what you’ve lost, then move forward. Then you can instead realize what you’ve gained.”

“Does it matter? When you tell a story loud enough and long enough, a story that plays right into people’s worst fears of betrayal, it grows its own truth.”

”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

“It’s a piece of violent entertainment that is a meditation on violent entertainment—as a concept in itself, and as a cultural obsession. It’s a love story: romantic love, paternal love, repressed homoerotic love, love of money, of power, of country, love betrayed and love employed as both carrot and stick. It’s a book about all different kinds of heroes, and all the different ways they die. It’s a pop-top can of Grade-A one-hundred percent pure whip-ass.”

—Matthew Woodring Stover

”Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

“You’ve already beaten the worst enemy you’ll ever have—that voice in your head . . . It tells you the fight’s already over . . . whispers there’s nothing you can do . . . If you beat that voice, it’s a victory that can’t be taken from you. You might die, but you’ll die fighting.”

“Opposites attract, but similarities bind.”

“My father would say: freedom that can be taken away was never real in the first place, and maybe he’s right. Maybe that freedom was always only a figment of my imagination—but it was an illusion I cherished. Shattering an illusion is the insult we never forgive.”

“God, I’m old. That’s all I can think for long seconds, all I can feel, every god damned day of my life piled onto my back. You have to be young to take shit like this. You have to still be young and adaptable, and full of optimism. You have to still believe in happy endings, to believe that suffering has a point, that death is not a meaningless extinguishing of consciousness. You have to be young enough to still hope that shit happens for a reason.”

“I am invincible. I am the Blade of Tyshalle. I am Caine.”

“You never get used to poisoning a child.”

“Incident: Poisoning of Lord Niceames, son of the 2nd Duke of Marutia.
Poison: Graybore
Incident notes: Lord Niceames visited Silasta on a recreational trip and took to life in the city, thereafter refusing to return to his duties in homeland. Presented to the hospital with a bloody cough and hair loss after apparent weeks increasing illness. Physics diagnosed graybore poisoning but Niceames died shortly thereafter. Traces of graybore later found in the man’s favorite perfume bottle. Political background suggests manservant may have been instructed by the Duke to carry out the gradual poisoning. Servant left Sjona shortly after the man’s death and determination council elected not to pursue further…”

“People may revere the idea of heroic veterans, but they very seldom have the time or the charity for the broken, battle-shocked men and women that are the reality of what war produces.”

“The world of intrigues wasn’t my natural environment. I was a soldier and businessman, for Our Lady’s sake. Politics was a foreign country to me, and I would have been quite happy for it to stay that way, but it seemed that wasn’t going to be the case.”

“Change, as I say. It’s something we all have to make our peace with, in time. It’s seldom pleasant and never easy, but it’s a fact of life and nothing to be done about that.”

“No one is ever simply an enemy, a lone faceless thing to be fought and killed. That was what was drilled into us in the army, to be sure, but that didn’t make it true. Every enemy soldier in any conflict has a family back home, people who love them and depend on them, but the army doesn’t want you thinking of the enemy’s family when you ram a spear through his guts.”

“Love

“Love doesn’t demand; it accepts. It has taken me my life to learn this.”

“Honor was only a glorified word for emptiness, and no sane replacement for the promise of continued life.”

“True honor does not condone murder. True power must equally shield the weak that we, for centuries, have thoughtlessly trampled under our feet.”

“You have taught me the true meaning of a warrior’s creed. Any man can die fighting enemies. But the real test of honor for a man is to live and learn to love himself.”

“You people never cry enough… Un

“You people never cry enough… Uncried tears remain inside you, like poison.”

“The most brilliant moves within the Game of Council were those that came without warning. The tranquil passage of days only made her skin creep, as if assassins lurked in hiding at her back.”

“Love by itself is the healer, not honour, not need, not duty.”

“Those who cling to tradition blindly, or out of fear of change, are fools.”

“You always warned me that love was a tangle. I never understood until now just how much of one, and how many were the thorns.”

“Battles did not always go as intended; the brilliant man, the master tactician, was the one who could turn setbacks to advantage.”

“That you have lived as you have lived for centuries is no license for this cruelty. All here are now judged, and all are found wanting.”

“The common folk are never caught up in the affairs of the powerful – unless they have the misfortune to find themselves in the way. Then they die. Otherwise, their lives go on, each day of work like the next.”

“If you would engage in the Game of Council, woman, you must know that the pieces you manipulate are flesh and blood. For the future, if you continue it is right that you should remember.”

“Who is to be more feared, one who acts from ambition or one who acts for the needs of survival?”

“Another lesson, child: men are easily injured over matters of the heart. More often than not, those wounds are long in healing. You may have won this round of the game, but you have also gained a deadly enemy. None are more dangeroys than those in whom love has changed to hate.”

“If doubts, even uncertainty, were permitted to grow, she risked paralyzing her ability to make decisions in the future… Regret must be banished, despite her momentary sorrow, and indecision must be forever kept at bay.”

“Life and death, and the winning of glory according to the code of honour, were a subject central to the Tsurani civilization.”

“Learn the nature of self, accept all aspects of self, then the mastery can begin. Denial of self is denial of all.”

“The days we’d spent swimming and fishing at the beach, the first time I’d kissed her, the dreams we’d shared – I was now the only keeper of these memories, and that was the truest sort of loneliness. There were so many things I still wanted to tell her, to share with her.”

“Little by little, he’d become more than just an animal, but a companion he couldn’t see himself being parted from.”

“It’s hard to remake one’s view of the world, to admit to complacency. I thought remaking myself for you was hard enough, but doing that was something I wanted. I didn’t want to realize how much I’ve hurt the people around me, and that’s what confronting my beliefs meant. We all tell ourselves stories of who we are, and in my mind, I was always the hero. But I wasn’t. Not in all the ways I should have been.”

“One foolish choice is like a rat you let go. It will spawn more consequences than you first thought possible.”

“10 years ago, after “the Gate” that connected the real world with the monster world opened, some of the ordinary, everyday people received the power to hunt monsters within the Gate. They are known as "Hunters". However, not all Hunters are powerful. My name is Sung Jin-Woo, an E-rank Hunter. I'm someone who has to risk his life in the lowliest of dungeons, the "World's Weakest". Having no skills whatsoever to display, I barely earned the required money by fighting in low-leveled dungeons… at least until I found a hidden dungeon with the hardest difficulty within the D-rank dungeons! In the end, as I was accepting death, I suddenly received a strange power, a quest log that only I could see, a secret to leveling up that only I know about! If I trained in accordance with my quests and hunted monsters, my level would rise. Changing from the weakest Hunter to the strongest S-rank Hunter!”

“Tell our stories to the world, and never forget that we exist so long as someone remembers us.”

“You’d be surprised at how often one looks in the present or in the future for answers that are always in the past.”

“Nobody must know what I have explained here. Nobody must know the truth, because I’ve learned that in this world truth only hurts, and God loves and helps those who lie.”

“Sometimes, when the gods aren’t looking and destiny loses its way, even good people get a taste of good luck in their lives.”

“A painting is never finished. The trick is to know at what point to leave it unfinished.”

“Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them.
A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images, and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.
This is the golden rule that sustains every artifice of paper and ink. Because when the lights go out, when the music ends and the stalls are empty again, the only thing that matters is the mirage that has been engraved in the theater of the imagination all readers hold in their mind. This, and the hope every maker of tales carries within: that readers will open their hearts to these little creatures made of ink and paper, and give them a part of themselves so they can be immortal, even if only for a few minutes.”

“One mustn't dream of one's future; one must earn it.”

“I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.”

“The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.”

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

“I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.”

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”

“Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.”

“We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.”

“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

“One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.”

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”

“True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.”

“He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

“There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”

“I am made of memories.”

“Then the wind stirred and Bast saw something white. He felt a sudden chill, fearing it was a page torn free from the book. Few things angered his master like a mistreated book.”

“So much was so easy. Glamour was second nature. It was just making folk see what they wanted to see. Fooling folk was simple as singing. Tricking folk and telling lies, it was like breathing. But this? Convincing someone of the truth that they were too twisted to see? How could you even begin? It was baffling. These creatures. They were fraught and frayed in their desire. A snake would never poison itself, but these folk made an art of it. They wrapped themselves in fears and wept at being blind. It was infuriating. It was enough to break a heart.”

“That’s the point. The problem when you think you’re an invincible fighting force is that you stop learning, evolving. It makes you predictable. Then the Egril showed us that we were only too beatable. We stopped being afraid of anyone. We stopped growing as warriors.”

“I’m not a leader. No one’ll listen to me.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s been in command who hasn’t thought that. It’s normal. In fact, it’s the ones who think they should be in charge that you’ve got to worry about.”

“People needed strength to follow, someone who could make hard choices when the time came, a leader they could believe would keep them alive. Ralasis was none of those things, but he could pretend with the best of them.”

“War’s orchestra played its merry tune in the distance explosions, screams, steel beating steel and the Gods only knew what else. Yas barely noticed it. Death and destruction had become as commonplace as birdsong.”

“Solving a problem or winning a battle always amounted to the same thing: concentrating on what was in front of you. Deal with that first. Worry about the rest later.”