Fantasy Authors

"All love affairs are tragedies in the end unless the lovers die at the same moment."

"Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now. But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it."

"We can only be what we are, nothing more, nothing less.- Kahlan- Wizard's First Rule."

"Your life is yours alone, rise up and live it!- Richard, Faith of the Fallen"

"Never let a beautiful woman pick your path for you when there is a man in her line of sight. -Adie, Wizard's First Rule*"

"No one ever goes into battle thinking God is on the other side. -Zedd, Wizard's First Rule"

"Fantasy allows you to shine a different kind of light on human beings. I believe the only valid use of fantasy is to illustrate important human themes. Magic in my novels is used in three ways: the simplest is as a metaphor for technology. A good example is a magic carpet. There's no magic carpet in my novels, but if someone needs to travel a great distance, they could use a magic carpet, while in a contemporary novel they'd use a car. The second way, and I think the most important, is as a metaphor for individuality and individual ability. The mediocre world doesn't want individuals to rise above what everyone else is doing. The third way I use magic is as a metaphor for coming out of an age of mysticism into a Renaissance. So, in a way it's the struggle between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. … I never allow my characters to use magic to solve their problems. Some of their peripheral problems are solved through their magical abilities, but it's couched in terms of overcoming those problems in a thinking way. The major conflicts in the books are always solved through human intellect, through thinking out the problem and coming up with a solution. It's never "I'll just wave my magic wand over the bad guys and have them all fall down dead!""

"No one is as fanatical as a convert. -Kahlan, Wizard's First Rule"

"Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy."

"People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action. All men have the right to live their own life. Democracy must be rooted in a rational philosophy that first and foremost recognizes the right of an individual. A few million Imperial Order men screaming for the lives of a much smaller number of people in the New World may win a democratic vote, but it does not give them the right to those lives, or make their calls for such killing right. Democracy is not a synonym for justice or for freedom. Democracy is not a sacred right sanctifying mob rule. Democracy is a principle that is subordinate to the inalienable rights of the individual."

"reality is nothing, perception is everything. -Zedd, Wizard's First Rule"

"Nothing is ever easy. Zedd- Wizard's First Rule"

"nothing is one dimensional. Nothing exists that has only one side, look at the whole. - Darken Rahl, Wizard's First Rule"

"Do you solemnly swear to serve the Republic in thought, in word, and in deed; to defend its citizens, resist its enemies, and champion its justice with the whole of your heart, your strength, and your mind; to foreswear all other allegiances; to obey all lawful orders of your superior officers; to uphold the highest ideals of the Republic, and at all times to conduct yourself to the credit of the Republic as its commissioned officer, by witness of, aid from, and faith in the force?"

"The first thing they did was pick up survivors. Because we are equipment, too. As long as the Republic takes care of us, we'll take care of it."

"Our enemy is power mistaken for justice. Our enemy is the desperation that justifies atrocity. The Jedi's true enemy is the jungle."

"I think that you are a very brilliant man. I think that you have more courage than you have ever guessed. I think that you truly care about this city, and the people in it. I think your cynicism is a fraud." "What-what-really, this is astonishing-" "I think that if you were truly as corrupt and venal as you pretend, you would be in the Senate."

"We always volunteer, sir. All of us. It's who we are."

"The troopers had not been fighting for themselves; they knew their lives were over. But they had never stopped. They were fighting for the regiment."

"They lit us up! Missiles incoming! Six count, closing, dead astern!" "Back-trace the missile lock and feed it to the computer for counter-fire." "Great idea! I'll get right on that first thing as soon as I graduate from gunnery school!"

"But... but... you can't fight the way things are..." "But we do. Every day. That's what Jedi are." "You can never win-" "We don't have to win. We only have to fight."

"Depa is right: Jedi are insane." "Ever since I came to this planet, people have been telling me how crazy I am. They've told me this so many times that I had started to wonder if it might be true. Now, though, I understand: you don't say this because it's true. Not even because you think it's true. You say it because you hope it's true. Because if I am insane, you aren't really the revolting slime-hearted vermin that, down deep, you know you are."

"It dawned on me then that Nick was proud of himself. Proud of what we had done. It may have been an unfamiliar feeling for him: that peculiarly delicious pride that comes from having taken a terrible risk to do something truly admirable. Of overcoming the instinct of self-presrvation: of fighting our fears and winning. It is the pride of discovering that one is not merely a bundle of reflexes and conditioned responses; that instead one is a thinking being, who can choose the right over the easy, and justice over safety."

"Jedi are supposed to stand for something, aren't you? You're supposed to stand up for what's right. No matter what."

"You can kill me, but you can't make me obey."

"You're in the jungle, now. There are no rules." "Of course there are. Don't be an idiot."

"I gave them the word of a Jedi Master that if they surrendered I would keep them from harm. I will not be made a liar."

"When you save someone's life. It's always temporary, y'know?"

"When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint."

"If no mistake you have made, yet losing you are... a different game you should play."

"He was moderately sure that a thirteen-year-old boy who'd load up four other children and set out in a steamcrawler across the Korunnai Highland at night-a boy who'd rather die than leave an unconscious girl behind-had guts enough for just about anything."

"Mace flipped up a thumb. "You think being armed and ruthless means you can do whatever you want." He folded his thumb and flipped up his forefinger. "You think nobody will stand up to you when they're naked." He folded that one again and flipped up the next. "And you think you're going to look inside my bag.""

"Mace stared at the man as though he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't: only now, finally, was he seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have had resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine."

"This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating."

"I don't have to be a hero, he thought in silent wonder. All I have to do is pretend."

"Here was the weapon of a hero. A real hero. Not a playactor. Not a pretend-hero, like Ganner had always been. But this weapon was now in Ganner's hand."

"The feeling he'd had, that he was about to get himself killed, swelled into an overwhelming premonition of doom. Ganner's knees went weak, and a very large part of him wanted to bolt down the corridor and get away-but though he hadn't been much of a hero, the one virtue he'd never had to fake was courage."

"I guess heroes feel like they've accomplished something." "And you haven't? Several thousand slaves might disagree."

"Fairy tales--simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life."

"Henry Michaux has been very important for me, with his Voyage en Grande Garabagne. Michaux was considered a poet but I find his work absolutely narrative. He would have been a flash fiction author today."

"I started publishing small poetry plaquettes. They were about 200 copies. Then I went up to 2 thousand and now I have reached 20 thousand. Last week a publisher suggested that I publish my books in a collection that runs 100,000 copies. I refused: what I want is to return to the 200 from the beginning."

"It is preferable not to travel with a dead man."

"In my night, I besiege my King. I rise up steadily and I wring his neck. He regathers his strength, I come back at him, and wring his neck another time. I shake him, shake him like an old prune tree, and his crown trembles on his head. But nevertheless, he is my King, I know it and he knows it, and it is quite certain that I am at his service."

"You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important."

"A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage... And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad..."

"It is almost an intellectual tradition to pay heed to the insane. In my case those that I most respect are the morons."

"No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth's interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death. (These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.)"

"A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here."

"A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth."

"Shit, kid, thinking about that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like I just ate a kitten."