“Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“fault. From the start, it had been him. He had brought Basrahip back from the Sinir Kushku. He had let the priests poison his mind and through him the minds of all Antea. Anyone who might have”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“I don't know what justice is," she said.
"That's because it isn't the sort of thing you discover. It's a thing you make." She looked at him, and he shrugged. "There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It's not that houses and songs aren't real, but you don't just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed.”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“As far as I can tell, life’s just one flaming piece of shit after another, except when it’s a bunch of them all at once. But”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
“Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And”
― Daniel Abraham, quote from The Spider's War
Daniel Abraham
Born place: in The United States
Born date November 14, 1969
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“Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.”
― Susanna Clarke, quote from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, quote from The Lord of the Rings
“War seems like a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle.
For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.
They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now, They take the wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.
If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron half helm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the small folk whose land they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad in all steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world.
And the man breaks.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Feast for Crows
“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
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An Enemy of the Peop...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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