Lukasz > Lukasz's Quotes

“There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

Whenever it rains you will think of her. ”
― Neil Gaiman

“To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever.”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“God, how I hate the future. It’s a cult. A tyranny of progress. And anyone who speaks against it is shunned. But all tyrannies must efficiently erase the past if they’re to work. I like the past. The past was solid, simple, and real. The rooms were large, the food was good, and we knew who our enemies were. I feel misty for old tyrannies. The ones which beat you, enslaved you, tried to break your spirit, and in doing so gave your life the only enhancement it really needs: a sense of purpose. The tyranny of the future doesn’t take away our choices; it swamps us in them. It doesn’t curb our freedoms; it tube-feeds us with them until we rupture like neglected factory geese.”
― Matt Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“I've lost everything, and by losing it I've gained the world.”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“That’s the real tragedy. I’ve come to see that what we had was better than that pitiful and pitiless intoxication they call love. It is the joy you have to truly know someone. To know another person as well as you know yourself, and to be happy to be unhappy in their company. To fall in love with someone you have to be blinded to their truth. It’s easy to fall for fantasies. But to know someone, and to want to know them, is truly the deepest honour we have as beings. To know another is a sacred duty.”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“Remember when you were young? … Remember when you weren’t just a ghost who changes faces to suit the weather, or a strange device used by others to manufacture their happiness?”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“Gladys, darling, light of my life. There are principles higher than mere survival. It’s not enough to live this life; there must be a quality to living. There are minimum standards. If a man can’t get an upgrade when almost every other guest in the entire hotel has been brutally murdered, then something is wrong.”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“But anything which reveals itself in words is just a truth committing suicide.”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“Then to Misty's Spice Boutique for food so bland and inambitious I doubt it'll ever aspire to become shit. It'll probably just sit in my colon yawning”
― M. Suddain, Hunters & Collectors

“When you're in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It's a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.”
― Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns

“I’ve given you money, he thought at the wonderful machine, now give me chocolate.
The vending machine lacked the willpower of the Western elevator, and it dutifully spat out several chocolate bars and a packet of salt and vinegar chips. I gave you more money than that, thought William, and the vending machine gave him some more.”
― Kit Abbey, All the Things You Have to Burn

“Simon Koertig took no pleasure from the act of murder.
That wasn’t true, exactly. He took tremendous pleasure from the art of murder. Of honing his skills, refining his craft, pursuing his quarry, and staging their perfect and elegant demise. Some murders were quick and brutally simple, others long and drawn-out affairs, but they were all handcrafted and beautiful acts. The relationship between executioner and victim, he believed, was more sacred than the bond between lovers.”
― Craig Schaefer

“No, after all this effort, all this trouble, jumping the man in a dark alley and strangling him to death would be vulgar. When he went home to write the story in his dead-book, it wouldn’t be a chapter to be proud of. Honestly, after all they’d been through together, he owed Felix a more dramatic death. It was the professional thing to do. As the miles limped by and the powerless sun crested in a cloudless sky, Simon wove together the threads of a plan.”
― Craig Schaefer, Winter's Reach

“I'm sorry," he says, his fingers closing around mine. "You shouldn't be looking at such..."

"Such what?" I ask, a question that is rapidly chased by another. "And why not?"

He glances down at the pictures, then tears his gaze away, dragging it back to my face. "Well, because it's improper, for one thing."

How cruel it would be of me to ask for a second thing, if only to watch him stumble and stammer while his gaze struggles not to dip down to those portraits a second time. "It may have escaped your notice at some point during our acquaintance, but I am a woman. And as shocking as it may be for you to believe, I have seen myself naked on more than one occasion, so you'll pardon me if I am not offended by anything these ladies have to offer.”
― Quenby Olson, The Half Killed

“There were the usual three all humans were born with, one in the center of the chest representing the Body, the second in the middle of the forehead for the Mind, and the third at the crown of the head signifying the Soul. But in that moment of clarity, Marta could feel a fourth Breath nestled deep in her chest next to the Body. Were she not so angry, she might have been surprised to find it, to feel it thrumming with its own frequency. It had a resonance, a musical identity all its own that only she could hear.”
― M.D. Presley, The Woven Ring

“The old man with the white beard had gone quite mad. He ripped his robes from his body and ran naked through the forest glade. He was babbling and shouting at the sky. His words were nothing but meaningless sounds — guttural grunts and lunatic ravings. His eyes were wild and his white beard and white hair were tangled with twigs and leaves. He foamed and spit and waved his oaken staff around like a club. He tried to grab squirrels and eat them raw. He rolled around in the dirt and swallowed small stones.”
― Jennifer M. Baldwin, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Have you ever run from a fight?”
Nel snorted a laugh, quieting the chirping of the birds in the gilded cages hanging from the branches above them. “I’ve run from more fights than I’ve fought. It’s why I’m still alive. Men who carry weapons tend to have a strange belief that it is better to die honorably than live to fight another day. Foolish. If the odds are against me I flee – and I’ve never felt any shame doing just that.”
― Alec Hutson, The Crimson Queen

“There are no gods, paladin. There is no afterlife, no eternal reward. You, in fact, are a slave to a creature you cannot even comprehend.” Demian stabbed the stick he still held into the ground. “All that a man has in this world is his own will, the freedom to do what he desires. Taking away that is the greatest crime one can inflict upon another. Murder – it is terrible. But it is over in an instant and the dead never can truly understand what has happened to them. They are simply gone. But slavery – day after day, year after year shackled to another’s whims – it is the most heinous of crimes.”
― Alec Hutson, The Crimson Queen

“Fighting was everything. It was even better than sex. And for all its dangers, at least you wouldn’t catch the crotch-rot from a good scrap. He’d seen a few folks die from that foul wasting disease, it didn’t look like a pleasant way to go. And how would you ever live that down, getting killed by a wench? Give him a sword death any day.”
― Damien Black

“She slapped down a mug of something that was, he suspected, technically alcohol, but only because it had a good lawyer.”
― Curtis Craddock, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors

“ell a crowd to throw away their lives for no reason, and they cheer and worship you,' Gramor mused as we drew close to him. 'But try telling them to go home and have a nice cup of tea — that's when they try to kill you!”
― Alex Perry, The War of Undoing

“Headaches from using my attunement? I could deal with them. Existential terror at the possibility of destroying my own mind? Pretty much routine at this point.
Doing paperwork for the government?
Now that was brutal.”
― Andrew Rowe, Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“There are many universes, perhaps an infinite number; that each contains, and is contained within every other; and that all of them sing together like voices in a choir. It is a beautiful thing - a song of infinite harmony.”
― Matt Suddain, Theatre of the Gods

“This isn’t some sweet Disney bedtime story. This is a real fairy tale. With death, and blood, and suffering. And I never promise a happy ending.”
― Craig Schaefer, Sworn to the Night

“Freedom. You humans do love to prattle on about freedom, and you barely understand the word. How much agency do you think you actually have? From the cradle to the grave, you’re bombarded with media, advertising, cultural and social pressure to conform…it’s amazing you can think at all.”
― Craig Schaefer, A Plain-Dealing Villain

“In the modern world it is not bricks and roads, cannon and swords that define power. No; it is paper. Books of law, deeds of ownership, writs of forbiddance and permission. Titles of lordship, directives of the king's sub-Ministry for Associated Trade. Memoranda from that last desk alone could sink and shake kingdoms, decide the fates of thousands across the sea. Ink runs thicker than blood. Paper: more powerful than an army or the pox.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Harlequin Tartan

“The street-crowd below held no one of interest. They bored me. They bored God. Surely they bored themselves. The beggars were dull, the passerby grey, the lounging riffraff leaned bereft of lazy charm. If any possessed magic, they kept it hidden. If they thirsted for miracles, they settled for drinking brown fog flavored with smoke, with a chaser of dust and horse-shit. Every tenth breath spitting it to the cobbles with a wet "splat".”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Harlequin Tartan

“What had I believed at ten? Anything I wanted. Any tale to make the day more fun, the night more alarming. In giant pigs rooting beneath the streets. In the corpse-eaters who pulled black carts by night, hunting children out past curfew.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Harlequin Tartan

“The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn’t work like that. And neither should a good story. A good story ought to leave a little grey behind, I think.”
― marcus sedgwick, The Monsters We Deserve