“Her heart kept splitting inside her. Growing and breaking, rended and rendered, reminding her that she was so, so sick of death. All it carried. All it buried.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“But their roots went deep, bound them together in a collective memory. With each new arrival, they pieced together more of their past, built more of their future.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“The loss inside him kept piling—vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls,”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“Don't show emotion." Kurt Löwe gave his son a rough shake, "Don't you ever show emotion. Tears are weakness. And I won't have any son of mine being weak. You're going to stand here until you top crying.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“Don’t let your heart get in the way of your head.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“Here was a people. A family. A faith.
Her people. Her family. Her faith.
Here was a silence broken.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“Fear is not an excuse,” Yael told him. “Fear is being human.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“All these skills I've taught you--they're burdens. Not gifts. Taking a life takes something from me. When you choose to kill, make sure it is for the right reasons. Make sure the decision is something you can live with.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“It will take time to heal. Just like all the others.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“You know, people don't want their intelligence insulted. They don't want to be preached to. They don't want to be degraded. All they want to do is sit, laugh, have a good time, love one another, forget about what's going on in the world, and find something out so they can be useful in this life. Do this and you have common sense.”
― Tyler Perry, quote from Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings: Madea's Uninhibited Commentaries on Love and Life
“Troops picked at their C rations, filled their canteens, and smoked last cigarettes. At dusk, each soldier tied a white cloth to the back of his helmet so the man behind could follow him in the dark. Engineers marked paths through enemy minefields with white tape or rocks wrapped in toilet paper.”
― Rick Atkinson, quote from An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943
“Rimed and sparkling with sugar, the wrestler lay like some child's flaccid sweetmeat in death, and the dogs licked his eyelids.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Queens' Play
“Change is hard. It’s hard for you, it’s hard for me, it’s murder on your sister.” His voice breaks.”
― Gennifer Choldenko, quote from Al Capone Does My Shirts
“I pray that the world never runs out of dragons. I say that in all sincerity, though I have played a part in the death of one great wyrm. For the dragon is the quintessential enemy, the greatest foe, the unconquerable epitome of devastation. The dragon, above all other creatures, even the demons and the devils, evokes images of dark grandeur, of the greatest beast curled asleep on the greatest treasure hoard. They are the ultimate test of the hero and the ultimate fright of the child. They are older than the elves and more akin to the earth than the dwarves. The great dragons are the preternatural beast, the basic element of the beast, that darkest part of our imagination.
The wizards cannot tell you of their origin, though they believe that a great wizard, a god of wizards, must have played some role in the first spawning of the beast. The elves, with their long fables explaining the creation of every aspect of the world, have many ancient tales concerning the origin of the dragons, but they admit, privately, that they really have no idea of how the dragons came to be.
My own belief is more simple, and yet, more complicated by far. I believe that dragons appeared in the world immediately after the spawning of the first reasoning race. I do not credit any god of wizards with their creation, but rather, the most basic imagination wrought of unseen fears, of those first reasoning mortals.
We make the dragons as we make the gods, because we need them, because, somewhere deep in our hearts, we recognize that a world without them is a world not worth living in.
There are so many people in the land who want an answer, a definitive answer, for everything in life, and even for everything after life. They study and they test, and because those few find the answers for some simple questions, they assume that there are answers to be had for every question. What was the world like before there were people? Was there nothing but darkness before the sun and the stars? Was there anything at all? What were we, each of us, before we were born? And what, most importantly of all, shall we be after we die?
Out of compassion, I hope that those questioners never find that which they seek.
One self-proclaimed prophet came through Ten-Towns denying the possibility of an afterlife, claiming that those people who had died and were raised by priests, had, in fact, never died, and that their claims of experiences beyond the grave were an elaborate trick played on them by their own hearts, a ruse to ease the path to nothingness. For that is all there was, he said, an emptiness, a nothingness.
Never in my life have I ever heard one begging so desperately for someone to prove him wrong.
This is kind of what I believe right now… although, I do not want to be proved wrong…
For what are we left with if there remains no mystery? What hope might we find if we know all of the answers?
What is it within us, then, that so desperately wants to deny magic and to unravel mystery? Fear, I presume, based on the many uncertainties of life and the greatest uncertainty of death. Put those fears aside, I say, and live free of them, for if we just step back and watch the truth of the world, we will find that there is indeed magic all about us, unexplainable by numbers and formulas. What is the passion evoked by the stirring speech of the commander before the desperate battle, if not magic? What is the peace that an infant might know in its mother’s arms, if not magic? What is love, if not magic?
No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.
And that, I fear, for any reasoning, conscious being, would be the cruelest trick of all.
-Drizzt Do’Urden”
― R.A. Salvatore, quote from Streams of Silver
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