Aksel Sjögärd > Aksel's Quotes

“Among the Rhivi of North Genabackis, there was a saying. A man who stirs awake the serpent is a man without fear. A man without fear has forgotten the rules of life.
Silanah heard their songs and prayers.
And she watched.
Sometimes mortals did indeed forget. Sometimes, mortals needed… reminding.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Is that you?" came Shurq’s voice from the darkness within.
"Why yes," Bugg said, "it is."
"Liar. You’re not you, you’re Bugg. Where’s Tehol? I need to talk to Tehol.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme—in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“I shall call him Tufty.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“But lessons only became lessons when one has reached the state of humility required to heed them.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Oh yes, I have learned much from Tremorlor, and so assume a like strategy. Silence, a faint mocking smile suggesting I know more than I do, an air of mystery, yes, and fell knowledge. None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions!”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“The first law of the multitude is conformity. Civilization is the mechanism of controlling and maintaining that multitude. The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization’s last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“You lack the requisite spine and testicular fortitude to study under me.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I also felt guilty about the three pens I'd stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“...’My children it is you. You are not what we wanted, not what we planned for but you are my experiment and you are a success,’ and that jagged edge part moves once again and she knows that some part of her, some locked away fleshy part, is trying to weep, but not from sorrow rather form pride. Only from pride.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.

Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance.

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Do you know how wizards like to be buried?"
"Yes!"
"Well, how?"
Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs.
"Reluctantly.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them - when she thought about them at all – as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew: there was 'goat who is my kid,' 'goat who is my mother,' 'goat who is herd leader,' and half a dozen other names not least of which was 'goat who is this goat.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort