Robert Kroese Quotes

souls of dead heroes to their glorious afterlife in the Halls of Avandoor, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Dead kings were honored in the Six Kingdoms only insofar as they had the good sense to stop walking around above ground.

There is, of course, a lot of disagreement on Earth about whether demons actually exist, what they want, and how much of the tax code they are responsible for.

This particular ogre, who went by the name Skoorn, was (by ogreish standards) exceedingly clever, and he had developed a taste for what ogres call "screech melons.

That's what people used to tell my parents," Verne said. "Why 'Verne'? they'd ask. And my parents would say, 'No, he's just small for his age.

You'd think that Modern Science would have found a cure for the common hangover by now, but evidently Modern Science has been too busy doing things like figuring how to reconfigure DNA and creating artificial gravity. Modern Science doesn't get invited to a lot of parties.

I'm sure that creating the cosmos was a great deal of work, but it happened before I got here. I didn't ask for it to be created, I wasn't consulted on the specifics, and I don't intend to pay for it.

had they gotten hungry partway through their vandalizing? That seemed like a stunning lack of commitment

The illusion of free will is straining under the weight of determinism.

Even hypochondriacs get sick sometimes.

People like me really shouldn't be allowed to build a people house until we've managed to build a bird house that isn't immediately condemned as uninhabitable by the avian building department.

democracy just seemed like the same old thing with a bigger group of idiots running the show.

You know what your problem is, Sasha?" Rex said. "You always want to have every little detail worked out in advance. You've got to leave some room for improvisation." "My concern, sir, is that you've given such a wide berth to improvisation that you've left no room for planning." "You

He was like an idiot savant without the savant part.

Job was convinced that life wasn't as complicated as everybody made it out to be. He believed that if you were nice to other people and you worked hard, you tended to do OK.

You know what happened to the last guy to make a pact with Lucifer, right?" "I thought he was still hosting American Idol." "Exactly," said Perp. "A fate worse than death.

How many of these rescue missions have you conducted anyway?" "More than I can count," sniffed the general. "I see," said Rex. "How many fingers am I holding up?

The big questions don't matter if you get all the little ones wrong.

The crowd was getting hysterical, so I reached into my back pocket and flippe open my wallet to reveal my badge. "Official business," I announced. "Please leave the area." This had the desired effect; it deescalated the mood and prompted most of the crowd to disperse. It's funny what a plastic badge and a meaningless phrase can do. The authority of the police is anothe mass delusion that can be useful at times. I hadn't even needed to claim I was a cop; all it took was a couple of simple cues to invoke the delusion.

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women.

provoke a challenge from Clovis, the Prince of Blinsk, who was widely known as a master swordsman. And of course, anyone familiar with the history of Dis will know that she got her wish.[5] Why would Shelly deliberately provoke the encounter that was result in her own doom? Perhaps she feared that in her old age, her natural tendencies would overcome her training, or perhaps she had simply decided that she had lived long enough. Either way, far from being proof of Tobalt's failure, Shelly's

She's right, thought Boric. I'm a dead man riding a winged bear named Bubbles.

People of a "scientific" bent have been known to ridicule those, like Harry, who believe unlikely notions such as the idea that the Universe was created in six days and that the first human being was formed by God breathing into a lump of clay. It should be noted that the latest scientific theories entail that (1) all of the matter in the Universe was once compressed into an area smaller than the point of a pin; and (2) life came about when a chance collision of molecules accidentally lined up three million nucleic acids in exactly the right order to form a self-replicating protein.

The Christians had then struck back with a decal of a larger fish, labeled "TRUTH," eating the Darwin fish, which distilled Christianity to its core principle: the ultimate devouring of Science by the giant, horrific Jesus-fish.

lurches forward like a charging rhino,

It requires a constant effort to keep people worried about inconsequential issues and unconcerned with important matters.

These days she tended to think of herself as a Heisenbergian Christian: she believed in the broad outlines of Christianity, but she was unable to pinpoint the specifics of her creed. She was OK with the wave; it was the particles that tended to escape her.

Shareholders," murmured Eddie, the word echoing meaninglessly in his head. His brain had screeched to a halt in front of an earlier word in the sentence, and it now stood (in a figurative sense) stock still, with its eyes wide and its jaw open, staring at the word in awe. Lovely Wanda Kwan, the vaguely Asian-American publishing company representative, had uttered, through her lip gloss and perfect teeth, the one word that every writer secretly yearns to hear. That word is movie. "Ms. Kwan," he began.

One thing I've learned, Sasha," said Rex, "is that no matter how poorly thought out a plan is, there's always a chance it will succeed unless I'm directly involved." "You

He had intended his address to be somewhat more comprehensive than this but was forced to cut it short, having been stabbed between the ribs with a broadsword.

We had become a country that valued security over freedom, power over justice, and war over peace.

This puzzling discrepancy prompted the development of the controversial cosmological theory known as the Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.

But consciousness (alternately referred to as "awareness") seems to be one of those things that although we know it when we see it, it's impossible to define.

It is also said that history is written by the victors. This was particularly true in the Old Realm, where the official historians at the Library of Avaress had been required for centuries to be named Victor.

If I look back on everything I've done and think, 'I couldn't possibly have done anything differently,' then what's the point in doing anything?

For one hour a day, Lucifer took a break from his surveillance to indulge a guilty pleasure: drinking a tall, icy glass of Schweppes ginger ale and watching The O'Reilly Factor.

That's right, folks. This is the sort of novel that starts with a fucking Venn diagram. Buckle up, bitches.