Tad Williams

“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.”

“Has everyone gone mad?” “Everyone was mad already, my lady,” Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. “It is merely that the times have brought it out in them.”

“We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.”

“Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.”

“There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. (...) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize.”

“So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”

“Since your father has escaped my justice, it is you who must hear my words." "Words. You keep saying..." "Because that was the gift your father gave to me. And the curse that ruined me as well, changed my life to wretched misery. There are hours yet before the guard comes - nay, eons. An eternity, in fact. This is my time, Miranda. Now you will have your words back: before I kill you, you will hear my tale... and you will know what you have done.”

“...a proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit.”

“Every man is the hero of his own song.”

“He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had”

“...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.”

“Welcome to the Information Jungle.”

“It was only after they had left the bridge and its gaurdian far behind that Theo realized he had left Tansy's telephone-brooch in the pocket of his jacket. He had no plans to go back for it, of course: as far as Theo was concerned, that piece of two-legged ugliness was welcome to blow out Tansy's long-distance bill or download a ton of troll-porn and charge it to the Daisy commune.Betray me, huh? Taste the Revenge of Vilmos!”

“Stairs. This is Hell. Hell is stairs, was all Theo could think. I'd sell my soul for a goddamn elevator. But I don't have a soul, do I? I'm some kind of fairy.Okay, settle for an escalator, then.”

“-You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell.-Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe--from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not?”

“Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”

“All people know the Greater Hunger...It is the hunger for warmth, for family, for connection to the stars and the earth and other living things...""For love?" Renie asked."Yes, I suppose that could be true.”

“Go down." It seemed obvious. "You have to go down before you can come out - that's how these things always work.”

“A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good.”

“The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.”

“... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?”

“During its timeless hours of movement and inspection, as it floated on the number-winds and learned from their shape and force, it had become aware of something else, something so far from the conceptual map of the environment it had originally been given as to briefly constitute a new danger to the Nemesis program's logical integrity.”

“She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.”

“After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?”

“Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip.”

“He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.”

“As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.”

“We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.”