Tad Williams

“Tangaloor, fire-brightFlame-foot, farthest walkerYour hunter speaksIn need he walksIn need, but never in fear.”

“Thank you for your news, Princess. It is none of it happy, but only a fool desires cheerful ignorance and I try not to be a fool. That is my heaviest burden.”

“Now I end my death song. I give my farewell to mountain and sky. It has been good to be alive.”

“Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all.”

“If you wish to carry a hungry weasel in your pocket, it is your choice.”

“I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?”

“What's the light of Heaven look like on earth? Like sunlight streaming through clouds in the tackiest garage sale painting you ever saw. Really, it's so beautiful it's embarrassing. No subtlety whatsoever.”

“I haven't met that many women, human or angelic, who actually like to drive. In my experience they seem to be much more pragmatic about the whole thing than we are. For most males, driving is an extension of their masculinity; they have little fantasy scenarios going all the time - races, chases, and dramatic combat with other drivers. Females, on the other hand, generally seem to view driving as something you do to get somewhere. I know, crazy.”

“So that's what--one "yes," one "not sure," and one "I had had a dream about a bug.”

“Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!”

“Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger; That is GodPiercing God's Hearte there is a Golden Needle; That is me”

“He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom - a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward heroic, legendary feats of sweeping.”

“You are only a prisoner when you surrender.”

“I thought... I thought you might..." "Help you? By my grove, I am helping you. You're not starving anymore, are you? <…> You had a dry night's sleep, too, and you're no longer coughing your liver and lights out. Some might count those as mighty gifts indeed.”

“Thank God for, as I posted earlier, the glow of work accomplished. Because a few seconds later, someone on the internet mentioned pie. I don’t blame them. It’s a good subject. But pie was mentioned and I remembered there was strawberry-rhubarb pie in the refrigerator. So I went there. And pie there was none. I suspect the teenaged boy has inhaled it. And now I cling to life and hope as best I can, because my world is dark and pieless.”

“You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)”

“I'm tired of being lost and I'm tired of dying, so I'm going to try something different this time.”

“Im Schlamm fing es an, wie so vieles.”

“Johnny Battistini had gone to Japan once as a replacement drummer for a metal band past its prime ... a one-shot gig that he had talked about for years afterward. At the time, Theo had been frustrated by Johnny’s inability to describe Tokyo and why it had made such an impression on him. Although he spoke about it frequently ... he could never explain his fascination more clearly than: ‘It was just ... weird. It’s like a regular city, but then it’s all different and shit. But to them it’s not different. And that’s the really weird part!”

“Just get up. What's your name, kid?" "G-man""I don't mean your codename down at the Dickhead Club. What does it say on your driver's license?”

“Why were men so caught up with their honor, their solemn word, their promises?Half the time the promises were never asked of them in the first place.And yet the wars that were fought over such things, the hearts broken and the lands ruined..!”

“If we do not reach our hands will always be empty.”

“Experience came easily enough, learning how not to suffer would have proved much more practical.”

“Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”

“Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.”

“Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman’s tongue? What good was beauty — a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless — if it cloaked such a viperous soul?”

“How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions.”

“People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?”

“In bad times, a king or a queen can be a rock for the waters to crash against, so those less strong are not washed away. I will be such a rock. Only give me a chance, sweet Zoria, and I will be a rock for my people.”

“Because love does not do sums, but instead make choices, and then gives its all.”

“If you are going to without trust. men tasks to do, then once they have proved themselves, you should let them get on without you standing over them. There is no point in giving responsibility wifh”

“but sometimes when things go very wrong and even the highest are frightened, innocence is not enough for salvation.”

“the road to Heaven is paved with bullshit and busy work.”

“Sometimes I talk about baseball just to annoy people who don’t understand it.”

“His virtual home showed none of the ostentation of others in the Brotherhood, no Gothic-fortress-perched-on-impossible-cliffs or Caligulean excesses of decor (usually accompanied by an equally Caligulean want of decorum.)”

“Theo knew enough about women and their clothes to recognize she was trying to strike an appropriate balance between... what? Between liking him and hating him? Between wanting to look good and not wanting to look too available? Just because he knew a mixed message when he saw one didn't mean he knew exactly which messages were being mixed”

“... those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.”

“There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.”

“He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC.”

“It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked.”

“Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out.”

“He was a figurehead - an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.”

“Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.”

“What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?”

“Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.”

“Pero... ¿Habría amor en un mundo semejante, Simón? ¿Existirían la belleza y el encanto, sin nada feo con que compararlos? ¿Qué sería un mundo sin sorpresas?”

“Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.”

“Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been, to discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age. Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.”

“As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions--for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones--my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.”

“If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad.”