Heroes Die (The Acts of Caine, #1)

by Matthew Woodring Stover

But he’d always been a better tactician than he was a strategist. He won every battle, but on days like today he couldn’t help realizing that he was losing the war.

Perhaps Emperors were always commoners who ruled by fiat, backed by a loyal military; who could say different?

“It’s so rare as to be almost unique, to meet a man who lives up to his reputation. Which do you think is more dangerous: the intellectual—” His gaze flicks up to match mine once again. “—or the idealist?”

“Sometimes I wonder if you really respect anything besides power.” “What else is there?” “You see? That’s what I mean, that’s a flip, glib, toss-off answer. It’s because you don’t care about what I care about. The things that are important, that are really important—” “Like what? Justice? Give me a break. Honor? Those are abstractions we’ve invented, to make the reality of power easier to face, to con people into voluntarily limiting themselves.”

“Subtlety is for the weak. It is a wheedling tactic they use to achieve their desires, when they lack the power to do so directly.”

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

A lie is like a pet—you have to take care of it, or it’ll turn on you and bite you on the ass.”

“Courage is admirable,” I tell them, smiling through the guard’s blood that still trickles down my face, “but it is not a survival trait.”

You’ve already beaten the worst enemy you’ll ever have—that voice in your head . . . It tells you the fight’s already over . . . whispers there’s nothing you can do . . . If you beat that voice, it’s a victory that can’t be taken from you. You might die, but you’ll die fighting.”

Sometimes, we destroy simply because we can. Because, when you come right down to it, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else.

There is nothing easier than happiness; it’s the feeling that comes when you’re open to the life that flows through you, when you know that you are the river and the river is you.

The greatest joys are expressed in the stillest, smallest, quietest ways.