Worth the Candle Quotes

“Curiosity is something that I tamed long ago,” said Amaryllis. “Do I want to read my notes from decades in the future? Obviously. It’s like a burning itch. But part of being a rational, competent person is in understanding that there are some itches that you shouldn’t scratch, for your own good.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“What counts as a book, exactly?” “‘Twenty pages, where the majority are filled with symbolic language, the majority of the pages are bound in some fashion, and there are covers surrounding the pages.’” said Raven, clearly going from some internal script. “There are some definitional issues there, specifically about what constitutes a ‘page’ or ‘cover’ in terms of material, shape, size, and topology. Why?”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“You went from hurting people deliberately to hurting them accidentally. Next step is not hurting them at all, and the step beyond that is actually helping them.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“A reframing on the facts can create an emotional impression that doesn’t actually fit with those facts. Even facts themselves can lie, if you select them with biased intent, or frame them in ways that play on psychological flaws.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“which meant that she was at least partly raised by the internet, and not the best parts of the internet either. To my knowledge, she never fell in with the kind of people who were on the lookout for impressionable pre-pubescent girls, but she did find a lot of those incestuous websites that have built up their own obsessive mythologies, rituals, and words of power. There were times when she was talking when she would drop in some random bit of deep lore from one of those places, or use a turn of phrase that no one around her was at all familiar with. Sometimes we asked her to explain, but mostly we ignored her, in part because her explanations made it clear she expected us to have read some obscure creepypasta or watched five seasons of a show someone had given a glowing recommendation to. (I’m aware that this is me saying that, trust me, I am, but when I dropped my references, it was either with the necessary background, or with the intent that no one would be able to connect. With Maddie, it was pure social disconnect, like she didn’t realize that other people had internal lives of their own.)”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“She was half-caste, essentially, but that didn’t give her solidarity with other half-caste; it made her dislike them in the same ways that she disliked herself.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“Adding that caveat would have been a bit more honest, but at the expense of sounding really sketchy.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“Meaning that we can set up a payout matrix,” said Amaryllis. “Figure out the outcomes, assign values to those outcomes, then assign probabilities.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure

“The Elon Gar were an order of monks who specialized in manipulating the mind; they could get by on ten minutes of meditation instead of sleeping, they could organize their memories far better than normal, and in general exhibited a degree of control over their own minds and bodies which on Earth would have been considered supernatural. Checking them out was on our list, but there was no quest, despite efforts at prompting one, and no obvious skill that needed unlocking. My guess was that they were the equivalent of the blade-bound, but for more social or mental skills, and ostensibly ‘non-magical’. Their best ability? Total control of their facial features. The monks of the Elon Gar were masters of keeping a stone face, which made them impeccable liars. And it was just like the Dungeon Master to throw one at us now that we had Valencia. “You”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle: The Infinite Library: A LitRPG Adventure