Tad Williams > Quotes

“As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.”
― Tad Williams

“He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.”
― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

“Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”
― Tad Williams

“We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.”
― Tad Williams

“She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.”
― Tad Williams, River of Blue Fire

“-You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell.
-Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe--from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not?”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.”
― Tad Williams

“After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip.”
― Tad Williams, To Green Angel Tower

“Every man is the hero of his own song.”
― Tad Williams, Mountain of Black Glass

“A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good.”
― Tad Williams

“Stairs. This is Hell. Hell is stairs, was all Theo could think. I'd sell my soul for a goddamn elevator.
But I don't have a soul, do I? I'm some kind of fairy.
Okay, settle for an escalator, then.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”
― Tad Williams, Shadowheart

“Has everyone gone mad?”

“Everyone was mad already, my lady,” Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. “It is merely that the times have brought it out in them.”
― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

“There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. (...) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.”
― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

“Go down." It seemed obvious. "You have to go down before you can come out - that's how these things always work.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.”
― Tad Williams, Stone of Farewell

“... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been, to discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age. Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.

No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.”
― Tad Williams, Mountain of Black Glass

“It was only after they had left the bridge and its gaurdian far behind that Theo realized he had left Tansy's telephone-brooch in the pocket of his jacket. He had no plans to go back for it, of course: as far as Theo was concerned, that piece of two-legged ugliness was welcome to blow out Tansy's long-distance bill or download a ton of troll-porn and charge it to the Daisy commune.
Betray me, huh? Taste the Revenge of Vilmos!”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“Welcome to the Information Jungle.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“All people know the Greater Hunger...It is the hunger for warmth, for family, for connection to the stars and the earth and other living things..."

"For love?" Renie asked.

"Yes, I suppose that could be true.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“During its timeless hours of movement and inspection, as it floated on the number-winds and learned from their shape and force, it had become aware of something else, something so far from the conceptual map of the environment it had originally been given as to briefly constitute a new danger to the Nemesis program's logical integrity.”
― Tad Williams, River of Blue Fire

“Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.”
― Tad Williams

“He was a figurehead - an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“... those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“Theo knew enough about women and their clothes to recognize she was trying to strike an appropriate balance between... what? Between liking him and hating him? Between wanting to look good and not wanting to look too available? Just because he knew a mixed message when he saw one didn't mean he knew exactly which messages were being mixed”
― Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers

“Pero... ¿Habría amor en un mundo semejante, Simón? ¿Existirían la belleza y el encanto, sin nada feo con que compararlos? ¿Qué sería un mundo sin sorpresas?”
― Tad Williams

“Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“Since your father has escaped my justice, it is you who must hear my words."
"Words. You keep saying..."
"Because that was the gift your father gave to me. And the curse that ruined me as well, changed my life to wretched misery. There are hours yet before the guard comes - nay, eons. An eternity, in fact. This is my time, Miranda. Now you will have your words back: before I kill you, you will hear my tale... and you will know what you have done.”
― Tad Williams, Caliban's Hour

“His virtual home showed none of the ostentation of others in the Brotherhood, no Gothic-fortress-perched-on-impossible-cliffs or Caligulean excesses of decor (usually accompanied by an equally Caligulean want of decorum.)”
― Tad Williams, Mountain of Black Glass

“If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad.”
― Tad Williams, River of Blue Fire

“As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions--for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones--my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.”
― Tad Williams, River of Blue Fire

“...a proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow