Mando > Mando's Quotes

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The brightest flame casts the darkest shadow.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”
― Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

“Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“You're old when your dreams become regrets”
― Gene Wolfe

“She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
― Mark Twain

“When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy.”
― Robert E. Howard

“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“You killed more people than anybody in history."

"Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“EMOTIONS GET LEFT BEHIND, IT'S ALL A MATTER OF GLANDS.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“If Clark wanted to, he could use his superspeed and squish me into the cement. But I know how he thinks. Even more than the Kryptonite, he's got one big weakness. Deep down, Clark's essentially a good person... and deep down, I'm not.”
― Jeph Loeb, Batman: Hush, Vol. 2

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He felt as if he’d been shipwrecked on the Titanic but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.

Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.

Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like “cl.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“We are in the damnation business!!!

And this, too, was a happiness. Of a sort.”
― Terry Pratchett, Eric

“The Tezumen were happy. When no amount of worshipping caused the Luggage to come back and trample their enemies they poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn’t have to get up so early to do it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Eric