Dead Hand Rule Quotes

“But hope must at times encounter disappointment, lest it stagnate to a mere estimation of probability.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Crisis ungirds us: tears away artifice to reveal the truth.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“I think you made the right decision.” “You do?” “Not the ordinary decision, or the easy decision, or the most convenient. But you have a talent for bringing the sword to the knot. It is a dangerous skill.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“And talk he did—gently, generously, at times with effortless eloquence and at times stumbling over his own sentences, as if his thoughts weren’t safe inside his head and had to be spoken lest they shrivel in the second-guessing silence of his brain.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Tremendous,” he said. “Such intricate tooling—look how it responds to the slightest presence of soul. Independently actuating—as if powered by, not the soul itself, but the potential difference between soul and hunger. Self-organizing, too—on these small scales, anyway. The detail is terribly fine. Imperial work, almost certainly, one of the pure-play fabs that inscribe glyphwork designs for external clients. Tiankong Necromantic, unless I miss my guess.” “You can identify the fab from such a small sample?” “There are no explicit markers, but institutions that can produce work of such resolution—well, there are three I’m aware of: a Schwarzwald experimental facility incapable of mass production, a Zurish military installation that might be functional or might be a piece of political theater, and Tiankong Necro.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“well, we’d have to wake up Professor Xaius in the ethics faculty to say for sure. They’re working on a rather delicate little project I think you’d enjoy—an auction-based system of ethical weights and measures. They say it’s intended for actuarial work, providing at best a rough estimate when confined to individual frames of reference, but it would be worth a laugh to consult.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Nobody knows what they’re doing,” Kai said. “Not really. No one knows all the angles. Some people lie about it, and a few lie even to themselves. That’s all.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Kai did not know which of them was receding, really—or if they both were, or if neither had moved but the distance between them expanded, like scholars claimed all space did over time.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“In their natural state, I understand the skazzerai to be somewhat holographic: each piece can unfurl into the entirety. They are like the Craft in that way, or the principles of exchange that undergird it: once the world is interconvertible with value in one location, for one people, it becomes interconvertible for all people everywhere, by a process akin to phase transition. These have lost that holographic function. Their delicate internal workings were fused, their carbon chains snapped. There are … elements missing.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Have you ever changed the world, Ms. Abernathy?” “I’ve done my best.” “So have I. The process is quite simple. To change the world, you reveal it. That is the Craftsman’s art, beneath all else. To flense away skin, muscle, tendon, to eviscerate the, well, viscera, until the structure of what is remains: the unbearable real. Once you understand that structure you may shape the unfolding of events, but your efforts do not themselves enact true change. Fear does that. Most people, the automatic billions, recoil in horror when presented with the reality upon which their lives are founded. They will do anything, anything, so that its cruel paucity may be concealed from them once more. They will beg you to make them forget how slender are the reeds that hold them above the abyss.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“They gathered by yacht and dirigible and rainbow bridge and shadow gate and analogy. Would it have killed them, Tara wondered, to take a dragon like a normal person?”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“He had always been quiet, but quiet like a blanket, or fresh snow. That had drawn her to him when they were kids together back up the alley—in those days everything about her, and her family, had been a constant throat-tearing scream. He was not blanket-quiet now. More like ocean-quiet. Raz, who’d spent lifetimes on the water, had told her about all the monsters a still sea could hold.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Already they’d had to shut down two brawls between Maskorovim and off-duty Imperium security, establish eight and counting temporary embassies, break up three joss rings, identify a dozen forms of novel intoxicant, and severely discourage Dame Alban from turning up drunk again (and how, exactly, please, did a necromancer with a body made of stone drink, let alone get drunk?) at the edge of the Verdance’s grove and threatening to burn him out no matter how many of his “leafy gimp hussies” he hid behind, which might have been construed as a violation of his diplomatic immunity.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“And this is Alt Coulumb,” said the knight of the plumes, at last upright, his visor raised. His eyes were keen and pale, and as he gazed upon the city of the Everburning Lord, its spires and its demonglass arch and its teeming millions, he became aware that upon first arrival in the great city of an ancient ally, a prince of a mighty house might be expected to make some proclamation of import. He summoned his resources of poetry. “Less blue this way round.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“The knight of the plumes reached for his comrade’s hand, and slipped off the wyvern’s back with the grace of a tray of silverware dropped onto a tile floor. Silence, eventually, followed. The knight of the plumes found his feet on the third try. They were somewhere north of his head, which had been the earlier trouble. “Unaccustomed orientation,” said the knight of the plumes. “Deuced inconvenient. Should have a word with someone. Who, do you think, would be the relevant authority, Sir Geoffrey?” “Gravity, milord.” “The trouble with your universal whatsits,” began the knight of the plumes— “Constants, milord.” “—is that they are a challenge to remonstrate withal. Given the lack of local habitation and et cetera.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Across town, harbor waters churned and parted to birth a vast, sleek gray hull, its lines more grown than molded. The vessel eased up to an empty pier, and wire tentacles split from its sides to make it fast. The vessel’s arrival was unscheduled, unheralded, and the harbormaster marched, red-faced and huffing, to the dock to remonstrate, club in hand and flanked by bullyboys. She was met by two cloaked and hooded figures, their faces wet panes of cuttlefish flesh. They bore completed triplicate documentation, safe passage signed by the Church of Kos, and a letter of credit with the grand seal of Iskar. Behind, from one of the vessel’s torpedo mouths, courtiers wheeled an immense tank. As night fell, more Wreckers emerged from the vessel to ward the pier with linked hands and tentacles. All night they kept their watch, chanting, though they had no mouths, in voices deep, wordless, and full of dread.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“The Shining Empire advance team built their own gate in the Hidden Schools themselves, in Armillary Square, beneath the great glyph-studded edifice of the Argent Library. Five junior functionaries in identical high-collared jackets assembled the gate out of parts from metal suitcases they carried, in an hour, as black-robed students gathered like crows to watch. When the last silver pieces snapped together, the senior functionary plied some brushwork, and the air beneath the peaked arch parted like a curtain. The honor guard marched through, in their ancestral god-masks—and then, at their heart, the oiled and careful knot of the Party in their olive suits, reviewing the world as might an engineer an unsolved problem.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Trees at the northern edge of the Sacred Precinct, carefully manicured by generations of Kosite priests, went mad, grew rampant, and in a shaded hour twisted their boughs into haunted shapes. Thorn branches framed a portal of shadow, and from that depth emerged the Verdance. His first body had been destroyed in battle in the depths of Ajaiatez a century before, and the remnant soul, not prepared for such extremity, had taken refuge and festered in dying, wasted wood until he rose anew to found the largest necromantic-earths mining consortium in Southern Kath. Chained dryads tended him. He wore a veil over features of rot and thorn.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“A shadow fell across an empty stretch of heavy-gauge rail leading into Alt Coulumb Axial, and sparks rose and a scream of metal—and then a black bullet of a train charged down the track, its ebon flanks glyph-gleaming. Red lightning darted from its wheels and its engine heaved steam like a lathered beast. The black train rolled to a stop at platform thirteen with a final sigh. Doors petaled open and skeletons in nightshade livery issued forth, bearing luggage, followed by hollow-eyed associates laden down with binders. Last, half-masked and gowned in aubergine and sable, came Belladonna Albrecht, her hair up, her boots black leather, her glasses full moons, her hands gloved to the elbow to hide the rainbow stain left by the blood of gods. A hammer swung from the belt of her gown. She reviewed the platform, and the city beyond, and the Schools above, and her full lips bared razor teeth.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“That they came at all, much less on short notice, was a miracle. Tara, who had been taught to regard miracles as a lazy student’s last resort, did not use the term without discomfort. But still they came.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Half these people want to kill the other half. Many have spent the last century trying. It is no small thing for their paths to converge. The powers we have gathered wield might enough to dethrone fate and change the course of the history. If we can convince them to work together.” “Yes,” Tara said. “If.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Early in the Wars, the jealous Gods had come for universities, for schools and scholars’ dens. Many students and their teachers fell, brought screaming to orthodoxy whether or not they had anything to do with the Craft. But some fled into the sky. And from the sky, they fought back. Abelard had seen the Hidden Schools once before, above his city, as in a vision, and he’d thought, They could not possibly be that big. Not really. I must have imagined it. I was dying at the time, after all. But here they were.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“If you submerged a pane of clear glass in water, it seemed to disappear, because the glass and water changed the light that passed through them in the same way and to the same degree. Abelard had played with the effect as a child at the kitchen table, making things into nothing with a turn of his wrist—and, with another turn, back into things again.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“He wished he did not sound so gentle. Wished he could sound as sure as the King in Red: a mountain to match the other mountain. But what happened when two mountains fought? Tara had told him about continental plates, immense masses of rock upthrust or folding down into fire. It had happened before. They called it the God Wars.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“When we rose against the old world,” Kopil said, “it was easy. We asked the people, how many suffer due to the unfolding of some ineffable design? How many cry out in pain because the atemporal colony organisms we call gods do not have the interests of human beings at heart, any more than a hive cares for each worker ant? Our deaths are their processes. Our suffering is their neurotransmitter signal. What is faith but the bright face of despair? And faith is what feeds them.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“You did what you could.” He watched the sky. “Life is not a game that you can win with perfect play.” “Spoken like a novice player.” “You can’t know everything. Anticipate everything. Control everything.” “Can’t I. Shouldn’t I make the attempt?” “No. And even if you could, a human heart isn’t strong enough to bear the weight.” “I used to have one of those,” the skeleton said.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Those sparks that were not eyes revolved upon him. They winked out, then back on, dying suns. It occurred to Abelard that the King in Red had not finished speaking, and was not a necromantic wizard-king used to interruption.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Sometimes, in the boiler room, you knew there was something wrong but you didn’t know how you knew. A novice would reach for tools and start taking things apart, but a master would wait and observe—set aside all nervous compulsion to act until the malfunction revealed itself in a whiff of burnt rubber or degraded lubricant.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“Come here.” The voice was long used to command. Then, a word that came less eagerly from its sheath: “Please.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule

“The King in Red did not belong. He did not seem to care.”
― Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule