David Anthony Durham Quotes

I believe that if you speak from your heart each time you open your mouth, you cannot go wrong.

She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else's life might alter hers.

She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.

The world was not to be trusted. Loved persons were always stolen. Dreams always squashed. That was life as she understood it.

She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course.

Zachary Jernigan can't write a bad story. He couldn't even if he tried. Each and every time I start one of his inventive, carefully crafted, thoughtful and mind-bending tales I know I'm in for a treat. This collection is sci-fi at its intelligent best.

The moment you begin to consider having more than someone else, you begin to fear you might end up with less than someone else.

Very little of what he learned of people's actions began or ended with either the noble ideals or the fiendish wickedness he had been taught lay behind all great struggles. There was something comforting in this.

Again he thought of his own losses, and he wondered why it was that the things a person had lost - or might lose - defined him more than the things he yet possessed.

They fed him a diet made up entirely of knowledge.

Imagine, they said, living an existence where the words out of your mouth changed the very fabric of the world around you.

It's a mass agitation of ambitious cocks!

To fatten a pig, a farmer will feed him well. The pig must think his life a paradise, never knowing he gorges himself so that he will be fatter for the knife later on.

I sleep lightly and tread to keep my head out of the sea of dreams.

She realized that the world was a dance of a million fates. In this dance she was but a single soul.

This really isn't fair," Mena said. "What is 'fair'?" asked one of the watchers called Devoth. "I don't know this word.

Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving.

She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.

When she spread her wings and leaped screeching into the air she had not the slightest doubt that every hand below her would stretch to catch her. And if one could leap from a height with no fear of falling, could one not be said to possess the secret of flight? Just like a bird, just like a god.

Revenge is the easiest of emotions to understand and to manipulate.

She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.

Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.

Scourge of the Betrayer is as harsh and profane as anything RichardK Morgan or Joe Abercrombie serves up. Fortunately, Saylards has the skills -and the humor - to pull it off. Snappy dialogue, political intrigue, shadycharacters, gripping action sequences, a poor guy that has no idea what he'sgotten himself into ... Yeah, there's a lot to like about this debut.