Max Gladstone Quotes

Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.

She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face.

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. "I told you so" had not been on the list. The

You need more wildness in your life.

The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you're a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your "kind", and neighbours who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation.

Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it. Resulting market fluctuations broke the Great Squid. Steve, the priest responsible, was promoted after the event, for exceptional skill managing a crisis,

Pulling her wrist from his mouth was as hard as turning from the gates of paradise. She fell back off the bed and sat down hard on the tile floor. The vampire snarled and rose to a crouch, silhouetted by the last rays of the setting sun. Her blood stained his lips and his chin. "What the hell were you doing?" Cat's mouth fell open. "What. I mean." He wiped the blood off his chin with his fingers and regarded it in fascination and disgust. "Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven't you ever heard of consent?" She

Affairs had fallen out better this time than forty years ago, but still he yearned for the water. Land lied to the feet, and to the soul. You stand, it whispered, upon unchanging ground. You build upon certainty, and your foundations will never crumble.

You have no power here," Jace said. His voice quivered less than Kai expected.
Ms. Kevarian cocked her head to one side. "Interesting assertion. I can speak, at least, and words have power wherever they are heard.

You people get so closed up inside those little brains. Their structure changes in response to thought, you know, like your muscles respond to use. The used parts bulk up. Bad training develops uneven strength; it takes time and painful work to balance unbalanced muscles.

A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors.

The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it's stupid about death.

Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn't matter so you don't have to worry about it.

To desperation," he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.
"And to bleeding hearts," she added, and they drank.

Humans need to dream, you know. It's how the mind breathes.

We cannot save our clients from themselves. Someday in your career, Elayne, you will represent a man - almost certainly a man - who wants you to help him barter his soul to a demon for three wishes. When that day comes you may refuse his business, you may try to change his mind, but in the end if hell he wants, hell he will achieve.

Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.

Craft could transport the soul to wage war on strange planes above the corpses of dead gods, but ultimately there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body.

So you assume we go around painting ourselves with pitch and swooping from rooftops to devour innocents, and call ourselves things like Shale Swiftwing, Beloved of the Goddess, Scout-in-Shadows.

Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet.

Everyone likes to be needed.

A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world. Perhaps the world he built lived behind his eyes and was transmitted to the page by the instrument of ink, or else it lived beneath the page somehow, his pen's progress sculpting form out of a purer white than sculptor's marble.

Words can wound, but they're bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound

Gods, like humans," he said, "are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and juice, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first.

You live in a grim universe."
"That's risk management for you.

Knowledge," Tara replied, turning a page as quietly as she could manage, "is power.

Then again, she'd worked with smart people - hells, she was smart people - and she never ceased to be amazed by how smart people could fuck up, given opportunity and time.

Always know the shape you take - know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.

I have observed friendships as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate behavior, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.

You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?

A shadow follows her. She has no proof, but she knows, as bones know their breaking stress.

She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren't careful, pretty soon you'd find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk - or worse, speaking German.

You're my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerers who I'd happily gut on the altar of that pyramid and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you.

Be careful. As if something's going to jump us in a library."
"You might be surprised."
"What do you mean?"
"You know how people say a book is really gripping?"
"Don't tell me ... " Cat trailed off.
"Libraries can be dangerous.

A thousand prickling tender touches lit upon her, as if she was caught in a rainstorm and the raindrops were love.

This is our second date."
"Some date. Fighting for our lives."
"We'll be fine," he said, without conviction.
"Yes." She sounded no more certain. "Next time, we'll go someplace nice.

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You can win the world, she said, if you're willing to lose your soul.

And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks. Up

It's art. If you're looking at it, it's working.

The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war." "Language, Elayne." "My apologies," she said after another sip of vodka. "One gets carried away when one feels one's dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error." *

Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.

The world's a complicated place, and it changes, that's all. People interpret the universe, and their interpretation alters it.

You never appreciate things so much as in their absence.

Xxx you can't escape yourself, and you're the only thing that hurts you in the long run.

Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.

Contract for Services Rendered, Alt Coulumb Kos Everburning to Royal Iskari Navy," she translated. "Since the common names are all the same, each contract needs a unique reference so we can tell which one we're talking about.

Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.

Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.

They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signalled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic.

Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad. There

You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we're caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.

He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also," she said after a pause, "he moisturizes.

Tongues and odors mixed on the air: Iskari and motor oil, sweat and leather, Camlaander and Archipelagese and some Shining Empire dialect like silk-muffled cymbals.

For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some it crept into his bones.