“Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations.
Their right to be free men,
Their desire to live in peace,
Their courage to seek out truth,
Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“They became sleepwalkers in a world of half-dreams and rambling thoughts with no break in the wearing march or the never-ending, silent black trunks that came and passed in countless thousands.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Either you believed in something or you didn’t—you couldn’t have it both ways and be honest with yourself.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Shea, particularly, had passed the point where his chief emotion was fear; now he felt only a sense of numbness that dulled his mind into self-imposed surrender, a robot-like acceptance of the fact that he was being led to the proverbial slaughter.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“He laughed in maddened frenzy, knowing somehow that he was no longer in a world of living creatures, but a world of death where soulless beings wandered in hopeless search of escape from their eternal prison. He stumbled on amidst them, laughing, talking, even singing gaily, his mind no longer a part of his mortal being. All about him, the creatures of the dark world followed in cringing companionship, knowing that the maddened mortal was almost one of them.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“It’s more habit than stupidity when I laugh at these things. I laugh at them to stay a sane man.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“... even a friendly smile shows the teeth behind!”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind. Now there are none—small communities are the new rule of life. Some things are better left alone by everyone.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“The highlander seemed to float through life very much the same as a cloud in an empty sky, touching nothing, leaving no trace of his passing.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“Il sole tramontava già fra le profondità verdi delle colline a ovest della vallata, e le sue ombre rosse e rosate sfioravano gli angoli più remoti della campagna, quando Flick Ohmsford cominciò la sua discesa. Il sentiero calava giù irregolarmente per il pendio settentrionale, serpeggiando attraverso i massi imponenti che costeggiavano il terreno, sparendo nelle folte foreste delle pianure per ricomparire a tratti nelle piccole radure e negli spazi liberi della zona dei boschi.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“All those men had died for some senseless reason, died perhaps without ever knowing exactly what they had fought to accomplish.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“—¿Qué hay de tu secuestro? —preguntó Menion mientras se vestía, mirando la esbelta silueta de la muchacha al otro lado de la habitación—. ¿Tienes idea de por qué querrían secuestrarte los norteños, prescindiendo de tu belleza?
Sonrió con picardía. Aunque no podía ver su rostro, estaba seguro de que se habría ruborizado. Ella permaneció en silencio durante un rato antes de hablar.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“En cierto sentido Shea parecía no ver que las cosas cambiaban ni incluso cuando el sol se movía desde el este al oeste en el cielo. No parecía darse cuenta de que los países y las gentes crecían y se expandían otra vez, que las guerras del pasado se olvidaban lentamente. Shea creía que uno podía volver la espalda al pasado y construir un nuevo mundo con el futuro, sin entender que el futuro estaba intrincadamente enlazado con el pasado, formando un tapiz de acontecimientos e ideas entretejidos que nunca podrían separarse del todo. Por su carácter, el pequeño valense era parte del pasado; sus creencias, un recuerdo del ayer más que una promesa de futuro.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“For a moment the highlander lay quietly and studied the room in silent leisure, allowing the sleep to disperse and his rested mind to awaken fully.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“I ricordi non sono tesori di vetro da tenere conservati dentro una cassa. Sono nastri colorati da appendere al vento.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“The wind began to rush violently as he moved on, and he became aware of other creatures in the darkness. They came first as a vague awareness in his mind, then as soft cries that seemed to seep through the haze and cling inquisitively about him. At last they appeared as living bodies, touching softly with cringing fingers the flesh of his person. He laughed in maddened frenzy, knowing somehow that he was no longer in a world of living creatures, but a world of death where soulless beings wandered in hopeless search of escape from their eternal prison. He stumbled on amidst them, laughing, talking, even singing gaily, his mind no longer a part of his mortal being. All about him, the creatures of the dark world followed in cringing companionship, knowing that the maddened mortal was almost one of them. It was all a matter of time. When the mortal life was gone, he would be as they were – lost forever. Orl Fane would be with his own kind at last. Almost”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“You have only to hear my heartbeat to know that each beat is for you.”
― Elizabeth Vaughan, quote from Warprize
“Stop! By the Keys I hold, I order the Nothing to stop! House, you must hold against the Void!”
― Garth Nix, quote from Superior Saturday
“[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.
[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, quote from Travels with Herodotus
“But I’d rather look back and regret something I did when I was young and crazy, than look back and regret something I never had the courage to do, and realize it’s too late.”
― Cherrie Lynn, quote from Rock Me
“Since Einstein derived his famous equation, literally millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas.”
― Michio Kaku, quote from Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel
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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