Four Roads Cross Quotes

“You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Humans need to dream, you know. It's how the mind breathes.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“What can we do in the face of fear? What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“The night’s triumph is inevitable as prophecy, but wet air holds the day’s heat, sweaty fingers tangled in solar curls.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Gods took away your wings. Of course they can give them back and call it a miracle.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“For Matt, the memory was one more weight to carry, and there was no place in him where it could rest easy, this ungainly thing that clunked and rattled but would not break.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“We’re so alone, she thought. We touch one another too firmly and wound or break, or else we pull away. We tell stories in which we are lone noble heroes, until we stand face-to-face with a goddess and see something older and bigger than each of us because it is each of us, our souls touching, the subtle interaction at a distance of minds with minds, when we reach the edge of loneliness and teeter uncertain at the brink.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Were the words his, or did they belong to Kos? What was he, anyway, but a piece of this burning web spun from a city’s dreams? He joined to Him by faith, by the burning of incense, by prayer, by kneeling before a fire. Where did Abelard end and God begin? They grew from each other.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight’s also short on funny faces. But there’s a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being’s first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“The weak-willed gratified themselves with needless displays of power.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Sometimes clients play dumb—they go to you for expertise, then argue with your conclusions.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“Wings flower-petal-spread
And teeth and claws the thorns
I grow to seek my Mother’s light
Her flesh my flesh, her skin my form—”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“I kill gods and guard them, and raise them from the dead when they die. I don’t pray.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“How does one discourage antisocial behavior among formerly human beings for whom life imprisonment is a brief inconvenience, if not an undefined term, and the death penalty a slap on the wrist? How do you keep a necromancer bound to the world by thousands of debts from climbing back out of her grave?

The answers ranged from grotesque to merely inhumane, but all shared a theoretical foundation: you don’t let the dead go free.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross

“You people get so closed up inside those little brains. Their structure changes in response to thought, you know, like your muscles respond to use. The used parts bulk up. Bad training develops uneven strength; it takes time and painful work to balance unbalanced muscles.”
― Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross