Dean F. Wilson Quotes

Just because his own wings were burnt, it didn't mean he had to burn others'.

The walls were painted red, and there was the painter up ahead, that candle-maned woman carving her way through the darkness, and carving her way through everyone she thought the darkness owned.

If you were picky about who you worked with in the Wild North, you'd be quickly left with no one to choose. You could try to pick the best of them, but you'd have to dig them up first.

The Coilhunter wasn't much of a talker. He liked to keep things short and sweet, just like the lives of criminals. Well, the short bit anyway.

But Agon did not force this prison upon you. He is the jailer of many, but you are the one who possesses the keys to your own cell. He may hunt you, but he did not lock you away here, nor force upon you the choices you have made these last few years. Your prison is in your mind, where you limit yourself, where you take on the voice of the Beast and speak to yourself the way he would if he could only get to you. But he does not need to if you will do the work for him. Fear is what locked you away, Ifferon, and fear is a tool of Agon. When you fear you open the gate that lets him into your mind. His greatest weapon is fear, for it drives strong men to madness. So why then be afraid?

She looked at her right hand, where the index finger was cut to a stump. Some said she lost it in an accident, when she was playing soldier with a live grenade. Others said she was taught a lesson by the law, and they took her trigger finger to make her keep on learning. Those were the lessons the Coilhunter liked. Why, he was quite the teacher himself.

Some men claimed that saying things made them true. Well, many men who said they were rich still died poor. Nox said he was cool, but that sun showed him he was a liar.

They journeyed on for a bit, then set up camp and cooked beans over a small fire. The poor man's meat. Drifter food. Some said beans'd get you across the desert and back. Dead men said a lot of things.

Nox didn't say a word. He waited, counting the seconds in his mind. Sometimes you counted bullets and sometimes you counted time. Either one could kill you.

Fear is leaden. Courage is golden. Let go of the weight of the world, and you will fly.

When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.

Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.

With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.

What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.

We read to escape, to embrace, to challenge, and to understand. Reading enages our intellect, but also our empathy, and we are all the better for it.

offering, and hope all the while that he would not

You hang your heroes. That way they'll never disappoint you.' It also brought to mind his own retort: 'But what about your enemies? What about the
villains? What do we do with those?

If you didn't have your guns, you still had your mouth. Of course, you had to be careful how you fired that off.

He fell, toppling forward into the sand. He hadn't even fully realised he'd lost his balance until the ground told him. And the ground didn't whisper.

They dived into the ocean of shadow and smog, adding to it with the fumes of their own aircraft. The goggles were useless now, but Jacob kept them on, in case there might be some break in the murky pool. It was fitting that the Worldwaker had passed through there, with the shark emblem painted on brightly. In those deep waters it could not be seen. It almost felt like it had lured them in. The dolphins do not hunt the sharks.

That youthful enthusiasm for the Resistance was killed off quick in new recruits, if they were not killed off first.

A new age is approaching, and its advent might make us pray to go back to the days of the trenches. Once the Worldwaker goes off, we will never be able to sleep again.

His father used to tell him that you can't eat principles. And no, you couldn't. But you could live by them.

His eyes were like galaxies, and everyone could get lost in them. How many stars flickered there, no one knew, but every time he glanced upon someone, a new star ignited, a new star was caught in the gravity of his stare.

That was the trouble with explaining with words. If you explained with gunpowder, people listened.

Darkness gathered there, smothering out the sunlight. As the fleet headed towards it, it threatened to smother them too.

They were shooting far, and their accuracy suffered, but Nox didn't exactly have a lot of places to dance through the bullets. They came in number, like rain. You couldn't afford to get wet.

The thought had crossed my mind, that in order to save this world from Hell, I might have to become the Devil.

The desert mocked the map-makers.

Then everything turned brilliant white for a second, and Jacob's eyes were stunned. The shock faded, but then another flash came, dulled by the darkness of the fog. Blades of lightning broke through the sea of smoke, accompanied by the violent clap of thunder, as if an angry god saw the storm devour them, and burst out into wild applause.

Sometimes all the players get a bad hand. You just have to be determined enough to see the game through.

The men followed, or at least their guns did, and they kept on shooting as if their bullets were sand. In the Wild North, they were just as plentiful.

Dynamite is loyal to the one who lights the fuse.

They began their climb, already weary, and the sun tried to steal whatever strength they had left. It was another god, a forgotten god, who gave a daily reminder, and was forgotten again each night.

When in the house of the enemy, the best rooms are always the ones with the lights out.

It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.

And maybe it's foolish of me to save up for a rainy day in a world of desert sand, but I've lived, and worked, through enough rainy days to feel the need to save up for an umbrella.

There weren't many amulet smugglers around these parts. They mostly served Regime territory down south, where the so-called "demons" reigned. If you didn't want a monster for a child, you'd pay a pretty penny for one of those necklaces. And if you were caught smuggling them, well, you'd pay with your pretty head.

Science fiction tells us truths that we mightn't listen to any other way.