40 Wise Quotes From The World Of Fantasy
1.
“Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.”
― Glen Cook, The Black Company
2.
“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
3.
“It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
4.
“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?”
― Garth Nix, Sabriel
5.
“There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
6.
“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
7.
“You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword
8.
“When you don’t know everything that you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
9.
“You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm. It’s really funny.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
10.
“Bran thought about it. ’Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’
‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
11.
“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
12.
“Sometimes, if you want to change a man’s mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
13.
“Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.”
― Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
14.
“When they killed him, Mother wouldn’t hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I’ve learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who’ve fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
15.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
16.
“Love is many things none of them logical.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
17.
“It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
18.
“I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine
19.
“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
20.
“It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
21.
“Children are dying.”
Lull nodded. “That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
22.
“There are only three people in life you can never fool–pawnbrokers, whores, and your mother. Since your mother’s dead, I’ve taken her place. Hence, I’m bullshit-proof.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
23.
“He would have told her – he would have said, it matters not if you are here or there, for I see you before me every moment. I see you in the light of the water, in the swaying of the young trees in the spring wind. I see you in the shadows of the great oaks, I hear your voice in the cry of the owl at night. You are the blood in my veins, and the beating of my heart. You are my first waking thought, and my last sigh before sleeping. You are – you are bone of my bone, and breath of my breath.”
― Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest
24.
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
25.
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
26.
“Why do boys say someone acts like a girl as if it were an insult?”
― Tamora Pierce, In the Hand of the Goddess
27.
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune
28.
“Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
29.
“Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
30.
“For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
31.
“That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
― Stephen King, The Stand
32.
“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
33.
“There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
34.
“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
35.
“True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
36.
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
37.
“The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead in the hollow of the queen’s shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
38.
“What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing–a very hard thing… But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine
39.
“We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
40.
“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates