Terry Goodkind
- Wizard's First Rule Ch 7
The wizards were under constant threat, and forbidden by edict from using magic. They knew that sooner or later they would be used against the people. They may have made mistakes in the past, and disappointed their teacher, but the most important thing they were taught was to be protectors of the people and in no way to bring them harm. As their most loving act for the people, they gave their lives to stop Darken Rahl. I think their teacher would have been proud.
Terry Goodkind
- Blood of the Fold - Ann
Zedd has succumbed to a bout of loud cursing and arm flailing. He is swearing oaths about what he intends to do to Nathan; I am sure he will find most of his intentions physically impossible.
Terry Goodkind
- Wizard's First Rule Ch 22
If we all knew each other's secrets, it would prove a very strange world. Besides, it would take all the fun out of the telling of them. But I fear no secret of a person I trust, and he has no need to fear mine. It is part of being friends.
Terry Goodkind
- Soul of the Fire Ch 57
Slaves, slaves to anything or anyone, despite how much they abhor it, will often cling to that slavery out of fear the alternative would be insufferable. Look at a drunk, a slave to liquor, who thinks us cruel for trying to to get him abandon his slavery.
Terry Goodkind
- Blood of the Fold Ch 36
As you learn to be other than Mord-Sith, like I learned as I grew up, you'll find that being a friend is to like a person for who they are, even the parts you don't understand. The reasons you like them makes the things you don't understand unimportant. You don't have to understand, or do the same, or live their lives for them. If you truly care for them, then you want them to be who they are; that was why you liked them in the first place.
Terry Goodkind
- Soul of the Fire Ch 5
Nathan said that sometimes prophecy overwhelms our attempts to outwit it, and that sometimes we think we are more clever than we are, believing we can stay the hand of fate, if we wish it hard enough.
Terry Goodkind
- Wizard's First Rule Ch 17
Everything is valuable under the right conditions. To a man dying of thirst, water be more precious than gold. To a drowning man, water be of little worth and great trouble.
Terry Goodkind
- Stone of Tears Ch 29
My father taught me something very much like that. He said, don't shed tears for those already in the ground, until after you have brought vengeance to those who put them there. There will be time enough, then.
Terry Goodkind
- Wizard's First Rule Ch 10
There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people. In the best of us there are thoughts or deeds that are wicked, and in the worst of us, at least some virtue. An adversary is not one who does loathsome acts for their own sake. He always has a reason that to him is justification. My cat eats mice. Does that make him bad? I don't think so, and the cat doesn't think so, but I would bet the mice have a different opinion.
Terry Goodkind
- The Pillars of Creation Ch 60
Life is the future, not the past. The past can teach us, through experience, how to accomplish things in the future, comfort us with cherished memories, and provide the foundation of what has already been accomplished. But only the future holds life. To live in the past is to embrace what is dead. To live life to its fullest, each day must be created anew. As rational, thinking beings, we must use our intellect, not a blind devotion to what has come before, to make rational choices.
Terry Goodkind
- Faith of the Fallen Ch 41
The most important rule there is, the Wizard's Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists, what is, is and from this irreducible bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. It is the foundation from which life is embraced.
Terry Goodkind
- Wizard's First Rule Ch 36
People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they're afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid's Tale - not in papers
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
Margaret Atwood
- The Blind Assassin - When you're young
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid's Tale - Falling in love
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
Margaret Atwood
- Romance
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Margaret Atwood
- The Blind Assassin - The only way you can write
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
- The Blind Assassin - If you knew what was going to happen
If you knew what was going to happen; if you knew everything that was going to happen next; if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions... you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood
- Cat's Eye - Love Blurs Your Vision
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.
Steven Moffat
- Doctor Who Narration - Amy Pond
When I was a little girl I had an imaginary friend, and when I grew up, he came back. He's called the Doctor. He comes from somewhere else. He's got a box called the TARDIS that's bigger on the inside and can travel anywhere in time and space. I ran away with him. And we've been running ever since.
