Brian Bakar > Brian's Quotes

“After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor beneath a photomural of Cypress Point and discuss their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

“The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“She knew exactly what she wanted and he didn’t, but his want would ache in him all his life. After he drove away in his jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me. He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn’t have both.”
― John Steinbeck, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

“When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City.” Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive word is “city.” Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold—rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of bursting excitement. She leaves a mark. Then I crossed the great arch hung from filaments and I was in the city I knew so well.”
― John Steinbeck, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

“If I’d have wanted civilization I’d have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living,” Augustus said. “Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“He was silent a moment, considering the problem of their shyness. “We’re about to eat,” he said. “It’s a free country, so my advice to you would be to make camp where you choose. I’ll borrow a pot from our cook and bring you some grub once you get settled.” “I’m much obliged,” Augustus said. “Noticed a tree in these parts?” “No, sir,” Wilbarger said. “If there was a tree in these parts I’d be sitting under it.” They made camp on the plain. Wilbarger was as good as his word. In an hour he returned with a small pack mule. Besides an ample pot of beefsteak and beans he brought a small tent. “I scarcely use this tent,” Wilbarger said, dropping it by their campfire. “You’re welcome to borrow it. The young lady might like a little privacy.” “I guess it’s your training in Latin that’s give you such good manners,” Augustus remarked. “The sky’s unpredictable and we would enjoy a tent.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Is the girl all right?” “She’s had an ordeal but she’s young,” Augustus said. “She won’t forget it, but she might outlive it.”
― Larry McMurtry, The Lonesome Dove Series

“I expect it was Dan Suggs and his two brothers, and a bad nigger they ride with,” Wilbarger said. “I think I hit the nigger.” “I don’t know the Suggses,” Call said. “They’re well known around Fort Worth for being murdering rascals,” Wilbarger said. “I never expected to be fool enough to let them murder me. It’s humbling. I lived through the worst war ever fought and then got killed by a damn sneaking horsethief. That galls me, I tell you.” “Any of us can oversleep,” Augustus said quietly. “If you was to lie quiet that lung might heal.” “No sir, not likely,” Wilbarger said. “I saw too many lung-shot boys when we were fighting the Rebs to expect that to happen. I’d rather just enjoy a little more conversation.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Where’s he going?” Roy Suggs asked, finding his voice at last. “Gone to pick a tree to hang you from, son,” Augustus said mildly. He turned to Dan Suggs, who looked at him with his teeth bared in a snarl. “I don’t know what makes you think we’d tote you all the way to a jail,” Gus said.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“You mean he made a fool of you,” Cassius parses, “when your father preferred a carved-up Red to his blood heir? That’s what this is, Jackal. The petulant shame of a boy unloved and unwanted.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Dancer waves his hand and the holographic display warps to show the great marbled gas giant of Jupiter. Surrounding it are the sixty-three smaller asteroidlike satellites and the four great moons of Jupiter—Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Calisto. “The purge instituted by the Jackal and Sovereign was an impressive operation that spanned not just the thirty assassinations of the garden, but over three hundred other assassinations across the Solar System. Most carried out by Olympic Knights or Praetorians. It was proposed and designed by the Jackal to eliminate the Sovereign’s key enemies on Mars, but also Luna and throughout the Society. It worked well, very well. But one grand mistake was made. In the garden, they killed Revus au Raa and his nine-year-old granddaughter.” “The ArchGovernor of Io,” I say. “Sending a message to the Moon Lords?” “Yes, but it backfired. A week after the Triumph, the children of the Moon Lords whom the Sovereign keeps on Luna as wards to ransom their parents’ loyalty escaped. Two days after that, the heirs of Raa stole the entirety of Classis Saturnus. The whole Eighth fleet garrison in its dock at Calisto with the help of the Cordovans of Ganymede. “The Raas declared Io’s independence for the Moons of Jupiter, their new alliance with Virginia au Augustus and the heirs of Arcos, and their war on the Sovereign.” “A Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty years after the burning of Rhea,” I say with a slow smile, thinking of Mustang at the head of an entire planetary system. Even if she left me, even if there’s that hollowness in the pit of my stomach when I think of her, this is good news for us. We’re not the Sovereign’s sole enemy. “Did Uranus and Saturn join? Neptune surely did.” “All did.” “All? Then there’s hope….” I say. “Yeah, you’d think. Right?” Sevro mutters.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“I would like to speak with the ArchGovernor,” I say. “And…may I say who is…calling?” “It’s the bloodydamn Reaper of Mars,” Sevro barks. “One moment, please.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Sometimes I encounter Ragnar’s legend. It has spread among the tribes. They call him the Speaker. The one who came with truth, who brought the prophets and sacrificed his life for his people. But with my friend’s legend grows my own. My slingBlade’s symbol burns across mountainsides to greet me and the Valkyrie when we fly to meet with new tribes. They call me the Morning Star. That star by which griffin-riders and travelers navigate the wastes in the dark months of winter. The last star that disappears when daylight returns in the spring.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“They wear kryll, organic breathing masks made by Carvers, over nose and mouths. Looks like the shed skin of a locust, legs stretching to either ear. Their tan combat gear is lighter than Core armor and complemented with brightly colored scarves. Long-barreled railguns with personalized ivory stocks are strapped to their backs. Razors hang from their hips. Orange optics cover their eyes. And on their feet are skippers. Lightweight boots that use condensed air instead of gravity to move their user. Skipping them over the ground like stones on a lake. Can’t get much height, but you can move nearly sixty kilometers an hour. They’re about a quarter the weight of my boots, have battery life for a year, and are dead cold on thermal vision. These are assassins. Not knights.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Darrow, it’s been an age,” he says with such mannered grace that I could almost convince myself that we were old friends reuniting after a long absence. But I will not let myself feel anything for this man. I cannot let him have forgiveness. Victra almost died because of him. Fitchner did. Lorn did. And how many more would have had I not let Sevro leave the party early to seek his father?”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“I’m in a dream. Unable to change the forces that move around me. To stop the sand from slipping through my fingers. I set this into motion but didn’t have the heart or strength or cunning or whatever the hell I needed to stop it. No matter what I do or say, Roque was lost to me the moment he discovered what I am. I step toward him, thinking I can take his razor from his hand without killing him, but he knows my intention and he holds up his off hand plaintively. As if to comfort me and beg me the mercy of letting him die as he lived. “Be still. Night hangs upon mine eyes.” He looks to me, eyes full with tears. “Keep swimming, my friend,” I tell him. With a gentle nod, he wraps his razor whip around his throat and stiffens his spine. “I am Roque au Fabii of the gens Fabii. My ancestors walked upon red Mars. They fell upon Old Earth. I have lost the day, but I have not lost myself. I will not be a prisoner.” His eyes close. His hand trembles. “I am the star in the night sky. I am the blade in the twilight. I am the god, the glory.” His breath shudders out. He is afraid. “I am the Gold.” And there, on the bridge of his invincible warship as his famous fleet falls to ruin behind him, the Poet of Deimos takes his own life. Somewhere the wind howls and the darkness whispers that I’m running out of friends, running out of light. The blood slithers away from his body toward my boots. A shard of my own reflection trapped in its red fingers.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“We killed him,” he says after a moment. “It was our war.” “Was it?” I ask. “We didn’t make this world. And we’re not even fighting for ourselves. Neither was Roque. He was fighting for Octavia. For a Society that won’t even notice his sacrifice. They’ll play politics with his death. Blame him. He died for them and he’ll just be a punch line.” Cassius feels the disgust I intended. That’s his greatest fear. That no one will care that he goes. This noble idea of honor, of a good death…that was for the old world. Not this one.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“They swing together, the Goblin and the Gold, suspended above the swirling crowd that’s now stampeding trying to get up the ladder to the walkway to cut Sevro down, but in their madness they overload the ladder and it bends away from the wall. Victra’s about to launch herself into the air on her gravBoots to save him. I hold her down. “Wait.” “He’s dying!” she says frantically. “That’s the point.” It is not a boy who dangles on that line. It is not a brokenhearted orphan who needs me to pick him up. It’s a man who has been through hell and now believes in the dream of his father, in the dream of my wife. It’s a man I would die to protect even as he dies to save the soul of this rebellion.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Your people keep trying to give me some kind of engine solvent.” He scans his datapad warily. “I’ve got Holiday on security,” I say. “This isn’t a Gold party.” He laughs. “Thank Jove for that then as well.” Finally he takes a sip from his wine. “Venusian Atolls,” he says. “Very nice.” “Roque had good taste. Your father is a sight,” I say, nodding to the dance floor where the big man sways along with two Reds. “He’s not the only one,” Daxo replies shrewdly, following my eyes to Mustang who’s now being spun about by Sevro. The woman’s face is aglow with life, or maybe it’s the alcohol. Hair sweaty and plastered on her forehead. “She loves you, you know,” Daxo says. “She’s just afraid of losing you, so she holds you far away.” He smiles to himself. “Funny how we are, isn’t it?”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“The Boneriders part to watch their master enter out of the mouth of the main hall to the hangar bay, flanked by a dozen more towering Gold bodyguards with shaved heads. Each tall as Victra. Gold skulls laugh on their collars, on the handles of their razors. Bones rattle on their shoulders, finger joints taken from their enemies. Taken from Lorn, from Fitchner, from my Howlers. These are the killers of my time. Their arrogance drips from them. As they look at me, it isn’t hate I see in their violent eyes, but a fundamental absence of empathy.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“My friends look at me, but I’m in a distant place, listening to the moan of the wind through the tunnels of Lykos. Smelling the dew on the gears in the early morning. Knowing Eo will be waiting for me when I come home. Like she waits for me now at the end of the cobbled road, as Narol does, as Pax and Ragnar and Quinn and, I hope, Roque, Lorn, Tactus and the rest of them do. It would not be the end to die. It would be the beginning of something new. I have to believe that. But my death would leave the Jackal here in this world. It would leave him with power over those I love, over all I’ve fought for. I always thought I would die before the end. I trudged on knowing I was doomed. But my friends have breathed love into me, breathed my faith back into my bones. They’ve made me want to live. They’ve made me want to build. Mustang looks at me, her eyes glassy, and I know she wants me to choose life, but she will not choose for me.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“And the boy?” I asked, nodding to Lysander, who moved into the ship carrying a satchel of belongings. “Sevro thinks it’s a mistake to let him live. What were his words? ‘It’s like leaving a pitviper egg under your seat. Sooner or later it’s gonna hatch.’ ” “And what do you think?” “I think it’s a different world. So we should act like it. He’s got Lorn’s blood in his veins as much as he’s got Octavia’s. Not that blood makes a difference anymore.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Darrow…” Mustang smiles over at me. “That is our son. His name is Pax.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“You installed a second telegraph in each one, one that connected to you here.” “Yes,” Kharn said. “You do not seriously think I would offer such a thing without benefit to myself. I ensured that I would know where every one of their fleets was at all times. For my own safety.” “And in return,” I said, “they built your engines. Dorayaica built them.” “So my brother told you that much, at least,” she said. “You tricked them,” I said. “You sold them the means to build an empire, but what you were really building was for yourself.” “I have received their every transmission. Every message. Every threat. Everything they have said to one another on my machines since the beginning. I received the summons Dorayaica sent to all the princes. I heard him declare himself king, and sent my congratulations. He believes me one of his servants, a fiction I have allowed to persist.” More laughter. The milky, black eyes grew wide. “Sleep with the Devil, and then you must pay . . .” I could not believe it. “You could have given us this at any time,” I said. “We might have ended this war a thousand years ago, before it had a chance to truly begin. How many lives were lost because of your silence? Your caprice? How many billion lives?” “I told you,” Kharn said, “when last you darkened my door: Mankind is nothing to me. The Cielcin are nothing. I have other concerns.” “Your own immortal life.” “I am as old as your civilization,” she said. “I was born in Omelah, on New Ithaca—a planet that no longer exists. I slew the last of the Mericanii, the true Mericanii, here on Vorgossos. I have warred with three of your Emperors across the ages—though that is forgotten. It was I who made first contact with the Cielcin. I am history, Marlowe. Should I be destroyed?”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Disquiet Gods