Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)

by Brandon Sanderson

The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.

I wonder if men who use cords to bind are fools, since tradition, society, and momentum are going to tie us all down anyway.”

“Besides, I’m less a force of nature and more one of the raw powers of creation transformed by collective human imagination into a personification of one of their ideals.”

“Storms, I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped you could tell me, give me an absolute right. For once, I’d like my moral code not to come with a list of exceptions at the end.”

Any chef worth his spoons learned to talk, because cooking was an art—and art was subjective. One man could love an ice sculpture while another thought it boring. It was the same with food and drink. It did not make the food broken, or the person broken, to not be liked.

What was the point of a little voice? Weren’t voices for being heard?

An army was the sort of thing everyone wanted to have, so long as it was off doing important things elsewhere.

The longer you live, the more you fail. Failure is the mark of a life well lived. In turn, the only way to live without failure is to be of no use to anyone. Trust me, I’ve practiced.”

Why was it that trying to stand tall should make you so much more likely to fall?

“All things exist in three realms, Dalinar,” Nohadon said. “The Physical: what you are now. The Cognitive: what you see yourself as being. The Spiritual: the perfect you, the person beyond pain, and error, and uncertainty.”

‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.’”