Dreams and Shadows Quotes

“Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares...They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked withing the soul of man.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“The sum of a man isn't the things he's done, it is the world he leaves behind.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“The universe was a vast expanse, far greater than he could ever conceive, and he had seen but a fraction of an inch of it.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Heaven has no room for the self-righteous.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“But the truth is, if everyone forgets about us, we fade away.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too--very much so--but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love."

"What did he want her for?"

Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'"

"Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“I don't remember her. But she feels special. There's this hole in my heart every time I draw her; you know, a sick sort of feeling. Like she's someone I lost.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Do you know the difference between a good man and a great man? A good man looks around at his brothers, sees their ignorance, finds himself horrified by it, and sets out to educate them. A great man instead finds himself elated by realizing that his brothers will never know any better, using it to his advantage to form an army of the ignorant, fighting to leave the world a better place. Ignorance is the only one truly unstoppable force in this world. And the only difference between a despot and a foundling father is that the foundling father convinces you that everything he does was your idea to begin with and that he was acting at your behest all along. Yes, people are sheep. Big deal. You need to stop trying to educate the sheep and instead just steer the herd.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Man fears what he does not understand, and every-thing else he first subverts, then controls or, ultimately, destroys.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided this is material enough to do it.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“You always assume we must have fallen, that we were thrown out of Heaven. Some of us just jumped.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“You're no man." "No," said Coyote. "I am his unflattering reflection." He shook his head. "I have outlived billions of gallons of blood, and you think I somehow delight in the spilling of a few more pints. You see my hand in the affairs of a few mortals and you think that I've but wound them up so I can watch them bounce off one another in the night. Never have you asked yourself why I might do such a thing--to what end this bloodshed might serve. The trouble with human beings is that when examining the actions of others, they always apply their own ethics and point of view., hoping to understand them in the context of what they might do and why they might do such a thing. When no answer lies in that examination, they always ascribe malice. Malice, you see, is the only thing people understand without explanation. You are born with it and thus come to expect it.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Love is the most primal force in the universe. It inspires us, pulling us over otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Art is created to exalt it, children are born of it, and entire lives are devoted to seeking it out in the most unlikely places.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“There was no such thing as destiny, and no such thing as prophecy; there was only matter slamming into other matter like two toy trucks in the hands of a child.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Everything else is perspective and window dressing.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“You need something to drink before we do this?"
Old Scraps grinned. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "I've been drunk for hours! HIYA!”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Such sad creatures,” said Old Scraps. “Angels or drunks?” asked Colby. “Pfff. Drunks are God’s chosen few. Angels are just his messengers.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Almost late and right on time would seem to mean the same thing.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“...the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided there is material enough to do it.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“It was a bar code of a property, generic, ordinary and anonymous.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn't the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“Puckett's Stacks was not the sort of bookshop one happened upon; it was the sort of bookshop for which one looked deliberately.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“It was the literary equivalent of a brown paper bag.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“It's as if some bored ethereal being is fiddling with the remote control to his imagination, clicking channel after channel without finding anything to capture his interest for very long.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“And when his head slumped forward into his book, she giggled, for she knew that he was hers.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“and”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows