Monarchs and Mendicants Quotes

“We lose keys and we find keys and we get new keys. We just have to find the ones that unlock the right doors. Sometimes, we have keys, but we don’t know what door they fit. That can be the hardest part, putting the right key in the right door.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Men who have been in war have a different attitude about being wronged.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Surviving is about need. Living is about want.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“I’m not lookin’ to be anybody’s keeper. What I say and do is meant to protect me. If it works for somebody else, that’s okay, but I don’t want people depending on me to save them.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“The true soldier knows nothing but war, and the true soldier, for lack of an enemy, attacks himself.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Seek until there is no hope and then seek further. Seek without end. Trudge on without tiring and without fear and without disheartenment. Trudge on, for it is within you to fight any enemy. It is who you are. It is your past and your present and your future. You will not quit. You cannot quit. Your breath is your courage, and as you breathe, so must you hope or you are already dead.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“He had no ability to give up. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to quit, he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. It never had been.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Despite his best efforts, maintaining dignity in a head attached to an unclean body wrapped in unclean garments was a battle that encouraged surrender.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“They may not have enough of their own to take a stand, but they can do it if someone shows them how.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Evil won’t leave you alone until you take a stand or until you’re dead.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“I don’t have to save them all, just a few, or one, and then that one has to go out and save another one until this half-dead world begins to climb out of the grave it’s standing in waiting for someone to throw dirt on it.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“We get so beat down by what we need, sometimes we forget how to want.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Not interested in scarin’ anybody, but people with good sense are afraid of a man with nothin’ to lose.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“On this morning his first waking moments were filled with the audible lamenting breath of having survived another winter night on the streets of St. Louis, those onerous recurring sighs that had become his respiration.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Death was an old acquaintance. They had met before. They were not friends. Not enemies, either.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“It remains for you to save one before saving others, to lead one before leading others.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“It must be great to spend time in a spot and if you walk away, it’s so much better than before because of something you did.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“I can’t tell you what’s in all of God’s plans, but I do know part of them. He empowers you with reason and will. Those are your strengths. That’s what gives you the chance to be great in his sight. He gave you a mind and codes to live by so you could be in charge of your own actions.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“The gear teeth of his mind, the cogs of the brain’s machinery that propelled his thoughts, were grinding to a halt, too long forced to fight against the friction of agony without the aid of hope, the lubricant for the soul.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Some people get what they want because they grab the power and swing it, and some people don’t.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“Politics is all about dividing up the power. Washington D.C. likes to talk about spreading the wealth, but never spreading the power.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants