“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

“Dalinar forced himself to be calm. "Roion, we cannot continue to treat this war as a game.""All wars are games. The greatest kind, with the pieces lost real lives, the prizes captured making for real wealth! This is the life for which men exist. To fight, to kill, to win.”

“Suspended for fighting. It had a ring. Not simply suspended, which could be for any number of inane infractions from skipping algebra to drawing nude cartoons of the principal and his staff on random backgrounds. Suspended ... for FIGHTING! It made you sound like something. Like a real badass dude from way back.”

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

“...universities were not meant entirely, or even chiefly, as stepping-stones to an examination, but that there is something else which universities can teach and ought to teach—nay, which I feel quite sure they were originally meant to teach—something that may not have a marketable value before a Board of Examiners, but which has a permanent value for the whole of our life, and that is a real interest in our work, and, more than that, a love of our work, and, more than that, a true joy and happiness in our work...”

“Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.”