Ascendant Quotes

The ascendant rules the outer personality - the way a person actually presents to the world. ~ Rosemary Breen

With The Dread, first kiss was the beginning. Second kiss was the end. ~ Luke Taylor

Gordian pays you to sleep with unicorn hunters. That's the definition of a whore. ~ Diana Peterfreund

A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it ... the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts ... . It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded. ~ William Manchester

You've won," Jack said softly. He looked at Mimi with such fiery hatred that she almost cowered at his words. But she was no weakling. She was Azrael, and Azrael did not cower, not even to Abbadon.
"I've won nothing," Mimi replied coldly. "Please remember that almost all of the Elders are dead, that the
Dark Prince is ascendant, and what is left of the Conclave is being led by a broken man who used to be the strongest of us all. And yet all you seem to care about, my darling, is that you no longer get to play with your little love toy."
Instead of answering her, Jack flew across the room and slapped her hard across the face, sending her
crashing to the floor. But before he could wield another blow, Mimi leaped up and slammed him against the window, knocking him completely out of breath.
"Is this what you want?" she hissed as she lifted him up by his shirt collar, his face turning a ghastly shade of red.
"Don't let me destroy you," he sneered.
"Just try, my sweet."
Jack twisted out of her grasp and flipped her over, kicking her down the length of the room. She sprung up with her hands clenched, her nails sharp as claws, and fangs bared. They met halfway in the air, and Jack put a hand on her throat and began to squeeze. But she scratched at his eyes and wrenched her body so that she was rolling on top of him, her sword at his throat, with the upper hand.
SUBMIT. Mimi sent.
NEVER. ~ Melissa De La Cruz

But to the particular species of excellence men are directed, not by an ascendant planet or predominating humour, but by the first book which they read, some early conversation which they heard, or some accident which excited ardour and emulation. ~ Samuel Johnson

The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication. ~ Wil S. Hylton

I am bought, she thinks. I am paid for. I am bought.

When she first arrived at the Environment Ministry as Akkarat's mole, it was a surprise to discover that the little privileges of the Environment Ministry were always enough. The weekly take from street stalls to burn something other than expensive approved-source methane. The pleasure of a night patrol spent sleeping well. It was an easy existence. Even under Jaidee, it was easy. And now by ill-luck she must work, and the work is important, and she has had two masters for so long that she cannot remember which one should be ascendant.

Someone else should have replaced you, Jaidee. Someone worthy. The Kingdom falls because we are not strong. We are not virtuous, we do not follow the eightfold path and now the sicknesses come again.

And she is the one who must stand against them, like Phra Seub - but without the strength or moral compass. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I'm making a lot of money. I should be paying a lot more taxes. I'm not paying taxes at a rate that is even close to what people were paying under Eisenhower. Do people think America wasn't ascendant and wasn't an upwardly mobile society under Eisenhower in the '50s? Nobody was looking at the country then and thinking to themselves, "We're taxing ourselves into oblivion." Yet there isn't a politician with balls enough to tell that truth because the whole system has been muddied by the rich. It's been purchased. ~ David Simon

Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-sa What I said: Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-savvy bond analyst. Drew Chapman is a debut novelist to watch. ~ Alafair Burke

Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority. ~ Jack London

If people suspect their Cattle Bewitched, if they be great Cattle, make the twelfth house their ascendant, and the eleventh their twelfth house, and vary your Rules with Judgment. ~ William Lilly

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others - even those with whom we are in conflict - love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. I alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love as power both to resist in our nature what we know we we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal. ~ Chris Hedges

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town. ~ George Saunders

The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter ... The powers of the mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. ~ George Gilder

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape . ~ Robert Charles Wilson

If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you're not jovial but miserable and saturnine that's a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred.
The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is. ~ Mark Forsyth

Most European nations identify themselves with eagles or lions, with some predator or creature of the air, ascendant and belligerent. I would like to visit the country which adopts the groundhog as its mascot, somewhere peaceful, some place that curls against the secrets of the earth, a little Belgium of the imagination, tables piled high with cakes, the Sunday bells ringing (not too loudly), the light falling on rolling hillocks studded with salad greens. ~ David Brendan Hopes

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness. ~ Walter Lippmann

I've been fighting for more than 24 years and as I continue my ascendant career I want to be true to myself. I want to try to be the best role model I can be for kids who might look into boxing as a sport and a professional career. I have and will always be a proud Puerto Rican. I have always been and always will be a proud, gay man. ~ Orlando Cruz

The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are ... All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposite sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this terrible world. ~ C.S. Lewis

...our low regard for nostalgia often seems not to rest on some substantive standard of excellence, in light of which a preference for the past is seen as missing the mark, but rather expresses idolatry of the present. This kind of "forward-thinking" is at bottom an apologetic species of conservatism, as it defers to and celebrates whatever is currently ascendant. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female. ~ Anne Rice

Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion - atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth - and said, "Let the Americans come." Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah - in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services - tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That's where we are right now. ~ Edward W. Said

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films. ~ Junot Diaz

The light over the whole hill was pure, pale, of an exaggerated clarity, as if all the good days of his youth had been distilled down into this one day, and the whole coltish ascendant time when he was 18, 19, 20, had been handed back to him briefly, intact and precious. That was the time when there had been more hours in the day, and every hour precious enough so that it could be fooled away. By the time a man got into the high 30s, the hours became more frantic and less precious, more needed and more carefully hoarded and more fully used, but less loved and less enjoyed. -Beyond the Glass Mountain (short story) ~ Wallace Stegner

We speak of persons as jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those who owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men. ~ John Aubrey

Izima's elaborate stagings of these exotic murder scenes had their genesis through a series of processes, from inspirational idea through imagination, to intention, and then initiation. The ascendant 'i' here might well be symbolic of Izima's 'I,' or ego, as he both composes and conducts these visual compositions, the sole purpose of which is to transfix and seduce the viewer's 'eye. ~ Izima Kaoru

I'm not the Ascendant Warior, Wayne,' she said. 'And I don't particularly care to be. I don't want someone I have to convince, someone I have to rope into submission. That sort of thing is for the courtroom, not the bedroom. ~ Brandon Sanderson

If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave. ~ Susan Jacoby