Matthew Woodring Stover · 418 pages
Rating: (11.5K votes)
“The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.
Two is enough.
Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.
Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow. In the end you don't even want to. In the end, you do not even want to. In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s voice had gone soft, and his hand was warm on Anakin’s arm. “There is no other Jedi I would rather have at my side right now. No other man.”
Anakin turned, and found within Obi-Wan’s eyes a depth of feeling he had only rarely glimpsed in all their years together; and the pure uncomplicated love that rose up within him then felt like a promise from the Force itself.
“I… I wouldn’t have it any other way, Master.”
“I believe,” his onetime Master said with a gently humorous look of astonishment at the words coming out of his mouth, “that you should get used to calling me Obi-Wan.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“The dark is generous, and it is patient. It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt. The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout. The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light. The dark’s patience is infinite. Eventually, even stars burn out.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known...
just-
didn't-
have it.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“I am called a great swordsman because I invented a lethal style; but who is greater, the creator of a killing form—or the master of the classic form?"
"I'm very flattered that you would consider me a master but really—"
"Not a master. The master.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“So this is how liberty dies," she was saying to herself. "With cheering, and applause.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“His agony somehow became an invisible hand, stretching out through the Force, a hand that found her, far away, alone in her apartment in the dark, a hand that felt the silken softness of her skin and the sleek coils of her hair, a hand that dissolved into a field of pure energy, of pure feeling that reached inside her—
And now he felt her, really felt her in the Force, as though she could have been some kind of Jedi, too, but more than that: he felt a bond, a connection, deeper and more intimate than he’d ever had before with anyone, even Obi-Wan; for a precious eternal instant he was her … he was the beat of her heart and he was the motion of her lips and he was her soft words as though she spoke a prayer to the stars—”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Until the time is right, disappear we will.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Which would leave Mace and Agen Kolar- -both among the greatest bladesbeings the Jedi Order has ever produced”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“He could feel the end of the battle approaching, and so could the blur of the Sith he faced in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear.
Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.
Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half kilometer drop.
Out where the shadow's fear's fear made it hesitate.
Out where the shadow's fear turned some of it's Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.
Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.
One piece flipped back in through the cut open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain towards the distant alleys below.
Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.
'For all your power, my lord,you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord,' Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, 'is under arrest.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Not his penetrating intellect, or his talents with the Force, or his unmatched skills with a lightsaber."
-Matthew Stover on Mace Windu”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Now Obi Wan did face him.
'Palpatine faced Mace and Agen and Kit and Saesee-four of the greatest swordsmen our order has ever produced. By Himself. Even both of us together wouldn't have a chance.'
'True,' Yoda said, 'But both of us apart, a chance we might create...”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Have you had contact with any other survivors?"
"Only one," the Alderaanian senator said grimly. "Lock onto my coordinates. He's waiting for you.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“You’ve been off fighting the war in the Outer Rim. You don’t know what it’s been like, dealing with all the petty squabbles and special interests and greedy, grasping fools in the Senate, and Palpatine’s constant, cynical, ruthless maneuvering for power—he carves away chunks of our freedom and bandages the wounds with tiny scraps of security. And for what? Look at this planet, Obi-Wan! We have given up so much freedom—how secure do we look?”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“And Anakin is on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That’s what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear.
He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn’t even slow down.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“...you must understand that not even the Jedi know all there is to be known about the Force; no mortal mind can. We speak of the will of the Force as someone ignorant of gravity might say it is the will of a river to flow to the ocean; it is a metaphor that describes our ignorance. The simple truth - if any truth is ever simple - is that we do not truly know what the will of the Force may be. We can never know. It is so far beyond our limited understanding that we can only surrender to its mystery.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Do or do not, there is no try. -Yoda”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith
“Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything—about everything I own in the world.”
― Knut Hamsun, quote from Hunger
“Often you don't know whether a woman is friend, enemy or lover until it is too late. Sometimes, she is all three.”
― Robert Jordan, quote from Lord of Chaos
“Gwydion stood as a wolf at bay, his green eyes glittering, his teeth bared.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Book of Three
“When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his ‘ticket,’ in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. “That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.” The men listened, silent and solemn. Leonidas at that time was fifty-five years old. He had fought in more than two score battles, since he was twenty; wounds as ancient as thirty years stood forth, lurid upon his shoulders and calves, on his neck and across his steel-colored beard. “Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside. “This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath. “What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine has turned the enemy’s spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it fatally into the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell? “When a man joins the two pieces of his ticket and sees them weld in union together, he feels that part of him, the part that knows love and mercy and compassion, come flooding back over him. This is what unstrings his knees. “What else can a man feel at that moment than the most grave and profound thanksgiving to the gods who, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day? Tomorrow their whim may alter. Next week, next year. But this day the sun still shines upon him, he feels its warmth upon his shoulders, he beholds about him the faces of his comrades whom he loves and he rejoices in their deliverance and his own.” Leonidas paused now, in the center of the space left open for him by the troops. “I have ordered pursuit of the foe ceased. I have commanded an end to the slaughter of these whom today we called our enemies. Let them return to their homes. Let them embrace their wives and children. Let them, like us, weep tears of salvation and burn thank-offerings to the gods. “Let no one of us forget or misapprehend the reason we fought other Greeks here today. Not to conquer or enslave them, our brothers, but to make them allies against a greater enemy. By persuasion, we hoped. By coercion, in the event. But no matter, they are our allies now and we will treat them as such from this moment. “The Persian!”
― Steven Pressfield, quote from Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
“منطقهای که در آن بردگی اخلاقی و جسمی زنان به حد افراط کشیده شده است، چون اینها تحت ستم مالک، پدر، برادر و شوهر هستند. اینطرفها مالک برای زیردستانش همسر انتخاب میکند و زن جماعت درست توی خیابان زیر شلاق پدران حیوانصفت و شوهران مستشان میافتند و مردمی هم که شاهد این صحنهها هستند در کمال بیاعتنایی تماشا میکنند. این خوراکی برای تفکر است! ما باید کاری کنیم که انقلاب نه تنها به استثمار انسان از انسان که به استثمار زن بهدست مرد هم پایان بدهد و در کنار برابری طبقات، برابری جنسی را هم برقرار کند.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The War of the End of the World
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