Peter David > Quotes

“That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food.
Adults are the death of hope.”
― Peter David, Tigerheart

“To the brave crew and passengers of the Kobayshi Maru…sucks to be you.”
― Peter David, Stone and Anvil

“If we can't alter the tide of events, at least we can be nearby with towels to mop up.”
― Peter David, Q-in-Law

“Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though... nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question 'why?' into a void that provides no answers.”
― Peter David, Tigerheart

“...They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.”
― Peter David, House of Cards

“Good enough, never is.”
― Peter David, Imzadi

“There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.”
― Peter David, X-Factor, Vol. 6: Secret Invasion

“To explore strange new worlds ... and assimilate them.
To seek out new life forms ... and new civilizations ... and assimilate them.
To boldly go where no Borg has gone before ... and assimilate them.”
― Peter David, Before Dishonor

“The Crimson King speaks. As a direct result, somewhere a slumbering, dreaming infant shudders in its sleep, and dies.”
― Peter David, The Gunslinger Born

“YOU SEE THEM SOMETIMES.

They're just out of the corner of your eye, when you're not expecting them, and sometimes if you close your eyes very, very tightly, and open them quickly, there will be a quick flash of them behind your eyelids before they dissipate.

They are the echoes of deja vu, they are the regrets that are fleeting, they are that which you didn't know you missed...

They are everywhere and nowhere.”
― Peter David, The Quiet Place

“Why Mr. Dickens, in his biography of that particular moment, preferred to focus on the adventures of the orphan parish child, Oliver Twist, remains a matter of speculation and mystery to all subsequent scribes of those long-departed times: of a London nearly two centuries gone, back when it was a pox-infested, grimy, depressing, fog-bound, class-favoring, sprawling, noxious, odorous, and overall distasteful place in which to live and breathe and sicken and die—as opposed to modern times, wherein the pox has been largely attended to; so that’s progress of a sort.”
― Peter David, Artful

“A moment later the scowling face of Admiral Jellico appeared on the screen. He looked as ill-humored as ever. Privately, Calhoun felt that somebody should send an away team into Jellico's ass, to determine just what had crawled up there and died years ago.”
― Peter David, Stone and Anvil

“I woke up dead.
Not only dead...but in hell.
I had always been somewhat sketchy on what the afterlife - were there actually such a thing - would be like for a person such as I. From all accounts and all my imaginings, I figured it would be one of two things. Either I would be surrounded by great, burning masses that were endlessly immolating souls in torment... or else I would find myself trapped within my own mind as a helpless bystander, condemned to watching me live out my life over and over again and powerless to do anything to change any of it. When idle speculation prompted me to dwell on these two options, I would find myself drawn invariably to the former, since the later was just too hideous to contemplate.
...
I was almost afraid to open my eyes, because once I did, I would know one way or the other. Perhaps I could have just lain there forever. Perhaps I was supposed to. Perhaps that was my true condemnation: to simply reside in hell with my eyes closed afraid of opening them lest matters deteriorate even further than they already had. This, in turn, made me dwell on the fact that every time I had believed things couldn’t get worse, they promptly had done so with almost gleeful enthusiasm .”
― Peter David, The Woad to Wuin

“The jailer voiced a roar that was intended to be on par with that of an infuriated lion, and indeed sounded like that to him in his own head (but to an observer or listener was much more akin to a consumptive mallard) and sped—which is to say moved with slightly less slowness than he typically did—to the cell that he had just absented.”
― Peter David, Artful

“Faith is an admirable trait. It's good to have faith in another person. But when faith is used as a substitute for reality, then it becomes a crutch for refusing to deal with that reality.”
― Peter David, Stone and Anvil

“Not that he wanted to say that. It would make it sound as if he wanted to blame her..
Women were very complicated creatures. He suddenly realised he was running through his head a list of everything he considered preferable to women. It was a long and most impressive imaginary document.”
― Peter David, Stone and Anvil

“Right, wrong—those are words thrown around by those what is in power in order to sit on the backs of those what ain’t.”
― Peter David, Artful

“All part of the service.”
― Peter David, Imzadi

“It matters not how it seems. All that matters is what is, and I will simply have to deal with whatever that happens to be.”
― Peter David, Artful

“Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where "we" are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“Youth believes itself immortal. There is a cure for such an attitude, but unfortunately it is a cure from which one never recovers.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“Running from horrors doesn't help. The only way to deal with them is to meet them head-on.”
― Peter David, Cold Wars

“I think that, to some degree, all of us are fractured souls. Cut in half. And we wander through life looking for the rest of ourselves. And sometimes we’re fortunate enough to meet someone who possesses, in themselves, the part of ourselves that we’ve been missing. We may not realize it on a conscious level, but definitely on a subconscious level. We see in someone else … something of ourselves.”
― Peter David, Imzadi Forever

“In fairness to the Almighty, though, it should be noted that lack of attention from God is not necessarily a bad thing, as the former residents of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the entirety of the Earth prior to Noah’s construction of an ark would have been able to attest. This would run counter to the desires of many former occupants of London who would have been delighted to see London, upon their departure, erupt in a tower of flame, cleansed by the wrath of God . . . .”
― Peter David, Artful

“When your heart's been cut out, how's it going to feel knowing that you're the one who wielded the knife?”
― Peter David, Imzadi

“I resisted the temptation to turn around and stick out my tongue in derision at Beliquose. After all, there was no telling when or if we should meet again, and I certainly did not need him saying, 'Ah yes, Poe, the fellow whose trespasses i could have forgiven in their entirety... except for the tongue thing. Yes, for that, you must surely die.”
― Peter David, The Woad to Wuin

“If I have a bow and arrow, Commander, I don't shoot a padded shaft to my target's left in order to express my annoyance. I fire a steel-tipped arrow into his leg.”
― Peter David, The Two-Front War

“The measure of a gen’leman is how he treats ladies. They can call themselves what they wants, but if what they says don’t match up with how they behaves, well, what they do says far more of who they are than what they says they are does, if you gets my drift.”
― Peter David, Artful

“In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing