Dan Abnett · 304 pages
Rating: (2.1K votes)
“Rebuild your world, rebuild your race, rebuild your empire. Rebuild it all. But make sure you rebuild your ideals too. Rebuild the principles that made you a great and honorable galactic power in the first place. Don't prey on the weak. Don't steal from the helpless. Don't murder the innocent. Be a force for good, not a force for yourself.”
― Dan Abnett, quote from Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
“That’s what I love about people. They have dreams and grand ambitions, and they start building towards them, even though they know they won’t live to see them finished. That’s how the pyramids were built.”
― Dan Abnett, quote from Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
“Do I look evil? I can't do evil. I can barely pull off dangerous.”
― Dan Abnett, quote from Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
“I have no idea, but I intend to retain a cautiously positive approach to the situation.”
― Dan Abnett, quote from Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
“He realized that, despite the dangers and alarms of the day, waiting was perhaps the worst thing of all.”
― Dan Abnett, quote from Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
“If it was up to me, I’d choose the hard path with the easy ending, not the easy path with the hard end.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from Ever After
“Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.”
― William Maxwell, quote from So Long, See You Tomorrow
“Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anyway. Names don't make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they're these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid's head in with a baseball bat. Or you're the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who's supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when's it coming? That's what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when's it coming? Because if it hasn't come for a long time, you know you're fucking due. All the best, Anyone.”
― Linwood Barclay, quote from No Time for Goodbye
“How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Herzog
“trunk. “Only you and Octavian can endure it. Our mother would never”
― Michelle Moran, quote from Cleopatra's Daughter
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