The Dinosaur Lords

There’s always another weapon to hand, if only you look.

No day’s too fair to die on, nor too foul either.

Careful what you wish for, lad, Rob thought. Blood’s not so easy to put back in, once you let it flow. Your own no more than anybody else’s.

One thing you should know. This world—Paradise—isn’t Earth. It wasn’t Earth. It won’t ever be Earth. It is no alternate Earth. All else is possible....

You have the power. Use it.

And not just because meat-eating dinosaurs used as war-mounts were as rare as honest priests.

After all, isn’t life always a matter of picking out the beautiful from the hideous?” “If only all things were beautiful,” Pere said. What then, dear friend? We strive to increase beauty in this world of ours. But we’ll never eliminate the ugly. Should we even hope to? You’re a master painter. Isn’t the figure meaningless without ground? Without ugliness for contrast, how can we perceive beauty? Isn’t it ugliness that gives beauty meaning?

What I’ve always insisted on from myself is to do as well as I could, and keep doing better until I’m at least competent. Long ago I learned that to achieve anything, one must start where one stands. Or spend eternity waiting for the right moment. Which never comes.

Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed.

Skill without self-mastery is hollow. A set of clever tricks, no more.

Reading about war is not the same as experiencing it, Highness.

This is war, and we get what we get, not what we want.

Be careful starting anything you don’t know how will end.

Never doubt the true threat’s not the monster, but the man.

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

Courage is as common as young men with more sperm in their sacks than sense in their skulls,” Karyl said. “The willingness of men and women to die without question is a virtue primarily for the unworthy, who use it for their gain.

The longest journey begins with one small step.

Beware getting what you want, son.

The woods-runners lacked any regard for borders; they considered all of Telar’s Wood, which spanned Nuevaropa from Slavia and Alemania to Spaña near the coast of the Océano Aino, their home.

There’s nothing more dangerous than one who lives as if already dead.

So it’s true what I hear, that victory makes strange bedfellows.

It’s the very challenge of the thing keeping the man alive.

To believe in power, Falk reminded himself, is to obey the man who has it. Anything else is anarchy.

Did you all drink a potion of grasping the obvious this morning?

You taught me the truth is always beautiful, no matter what it is. So I shouldn’t be afraid to face it.

Taking life’s a serious thing, because it’s irrevocable.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my lives, it’s that there’s no magic on this wretched little world of ours.

Are you a lover of music, then, for all your crimes against her?” A corner of Karyl’s mouth quirked up. “My piping’s scarcely the worst of my crimes.