Gregory Amato > Gregory's Quotes

“I'll teach you some good bad habits. You'll need 'em.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
― Robert E. Howard

“Did you deem yourself strong because you were able to twist the heads off civilised folk, poor weaklings with muscles like rotten string? Hell! Break the neck of a wild Cimmerian bull before you call yourself strong.”
― Robert E. Howard, Man-Eaters of Zamboula

“So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of a somber race:
"Worthy of death he well may be,
but the court ye held was a mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where Justice hid her face.

"More of the man had ye been,
on deck your sword to cleanly draw
"Inforthright fury from its sheath,
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of Law.”
― Robert E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

“Home is where heart is. Heart where cookie is. Math clear: Home is cookie.”
― Cookie Monster, The Joy of Cookies: Cookie Monster's Guide to Life

“Drinking is never early for a wizard, nor is it late. A wizard drinks precisely when he means to.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“Or less charitably, you could call the Rus a bunch of miserable Swedes who went too far east and got even more miserable than they were before.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“She was beautiful but unattainable, which only increased my attraction to her.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“What if an enterprising (or perhaps just ill-natured) fisherman found part of the serpent's body a few thousand miles away from his head and decided to cut it open and take a peek inside? It would take hours or days for Jormungand to respond to such and insult.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“Perhaps she was cat-shirted, and from there derived her rage at all living things, as cats hate them all.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“We call that the story of the Volsungs, the most famous and most stupid family in the history of Midgard”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“The road to Asgard is paved with head injuries.”
― Gregory Amato, Burden to Bear

“The gods do not help you forget things. That is what alcohol is for, and why it is so much more important than faith.”
― Gregory Amato

“[A]dventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result -- and have been since at least the time of Odysseus -- of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home.”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion.”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“Not always," said his nephew, a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness, and who expended all of his energies, as far as Joseph could see, on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience.”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“When people say that this kind of fantasy fiction is escapist and evading the real world, well I think that’s an evasion. It’s actually trying to confront something that most people would rather not confront.”
― Tom Shippey

“While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.”
― Terry Pratchett

“It is a mistake just to blame everything on evil forces ‘out there’, the habit of xenophobes and popular journalists; just as much a mistake to luxuriate in self-analysis, the great skill of Tolkien’s contemporaries, the cosseted upper-class writers of the ‘modernist’ movement.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Many critics have complained of Tolkien’s archaic style in one section or another; they have failed to realize that he understood archaism far more technically than they ever could, and could switch it on and off at will, as he could modern colloquialism.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Saruman is the most contemporary figure in Middle-earth, both politically and linguistically. He is on the road to ‘doublethink’ (which Orwell was to invent, or describe, at almost exactly the same time).”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“[Tolkien's] rejection of mere militarism, his recognition that there are other qualities than those of a warrior or a general, backs up his claim that Gondor is a more reflective society, and one with a longer history, than the Riddermark. The claim is also tacitly demonstrated by Faramir’s capacity for subtlety, understatement, a reverence for truth which nevertheless includes a relatively oblique approach to it, well beyond Éomer’s blunt aggressions and withdrawals.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Man deÞ swa he byÞ Þonne he mot swa he wile, ‘A man does as he is when he can do what he wants’, and what this means is that power reveals character, not that it alters it.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Old English word is wyrd, which most glossaries and dictionaries translate as ‘fate’. Tolkien knew that the etymologies of the two words were quite different, ‘fate’ coming from the Latin fari, ‘to speak’, so ‘that which has been spoken’, sc. by the gods. The Old English word derives from weorÞan, ‘to become’: it means ‘what has become, what’s over’, so among other things, ‘history’ – a historian is a wyrdwritere, a writer-down of wyrd.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“. . . Tolkien disliked vague allegories, allegories which didn’t work, though he accepted them readily in their proper place, which was either advancing an argument (as in the Beowulf example) or else constructing brief and personal fables . . .”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“One sees ‘Sandyman’s disease’ in an advanced form in Saruman: it starts as intellectual curiosity, develops as engineering skill, turns into greed and the desire to dominate, corrupts further into a hatred and contempt of the natural world which goes beyond any rational desire to use it.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century