John Dow > John's Quotes

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“But worst of all is the freckled girl. A Cancer. A harbinger of death. Dark green clouds of disease spew from her hands. With one breath, the soldiers’ bodies seize.”
― Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

“The suffering faces of depleted men and women reached across to them, pleading not so much for help – they were beyond that – but for an explanation. Just something to subdue this confusion.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Sometimes there are leaders who work to do good in the world,” she said. “Brave men whose values are more important to them than doing what they think people want and expect of them. Then there are other leaders. They come to power because they inherited it or because their supporters are more vocal, more violent, and more intimidating than those who just want to live their lives.”
― James Maxwell, The Hidden Relic

“There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“Strider” I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“That’s not the proof I want.’ ‘You’ll have such proof as exists. You are the only one responsible for your own wants.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Essentially they were those who had not adapted themselves to what had once been called the Atomic Age, in the days when atoms were a novelty. Actually, they were the Simple-Lifers, hungering after a life, which to those who had lived it had probably appeared not so Simple, and who had been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“in February 1982, Ozzy was arrested during a tour-stop in San Antonio, for urinating on the Alamo (while dressed as Sharon, who had stolen his clothes in an attempt to keep him from going out),”
― Mick Wall, Black Sabbath: The Inside Story of the Legend Ozzy Osbourne

“Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: Simpletons! Yes, yes! I’m a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We’ll build a town and we’ll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they’ll be dead! Simpletons! Let’s go! This ought to show ’em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Never trust a cat, anyway. All they’re good for is stringing tennis racquets.”
― Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October

“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“No idea is too strange or ridiculous. An unworkable idea may inspire in someone else an idea that will work.”
― Richard Paul Russo, Unto Leviathan

“That’s safe,’ Heather assured him. ‘There’s no way into the cellar from outside.”
― Dean Koontz, Winter Moon: A brilliant thriller of heart-stopping suspense

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“It struck him as strange but true that tourists bought trinkets and souvenirs of religious places because they had no idea what else to do when they got there.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one’s own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.”
― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters

“The Errant follows the Warlock King, to see what he plans. The Warlock King meddles with nefarious rituals set in place by another ascendant, who in turn leaves off eating a freshly killed corpse and makes for an unexpected rendezvous with said Warlock King, where they will probably make each other’s acquaintance then bargain to mutual benefit over the crumbling chains binding another ascendant – one soon to be freed, which will perturb someone far to the north, although that one is probably not yet ready to act. In the meantime, the long-departed Edur fleet skirts the Draconean Sea and shall soon enter the river mouth on its fated return to our fair city, and with it are two fell champions, neither of whom is likely to do what is expected of them. Now, to add spice to all of that, the secret that is the soul of one Scabandari Bloodeye will, in a depressingly short time, cease to be a secret, and consequently and in addition to and concomitant with, we are in for an interesting summer.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“The gods are fools, alas, in believing every piece in the game is known. That the rules are fixed and accepted by all; that every wager is counted and marked, exposed and glittering on the table. The gods lay out their perfect paths to the perfect thrones, each one representing perfect power. The gods are fools because it never occurs to them that not everyone uses paths.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Aye.’ It’s a good word, I think. More a whole attitude than a word, really. With lots of meaning in it, too. A bit of ‘yes’ and a bit of ‘well, fuck’ and maybe some ‘we’re all in this mess together’. So, a word to sum up the Malazans.”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“Do I want a conversation? No, I do not. What’s to say? Anomander killed Hood, Dassem killed Anomander, Brood shattered Dragnipur, and now Draconus walks free. Burn trembles, the Gate of Starvald Demelain rages with fire, and cruel twisted warrens the like of which we’ve never before seen now lie in wait – when will they awaken? What will they deliver?”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams