Max Gladstone Quotes & Sayings

Falling, again, and always. Kai's eyes sang. — Max Gladstone

A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world. Perhaps the world he built lived behind his eyes and was transmitted to the page by the instrument of ink, or else it lived beneath the page somehow, his pen's progress sculpting form out of a purer white than sculptor's marble. — Max Gladstone

You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we're caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive. — Max Gladstone

You're talking as if this is an opportunity." "It is. You asked me for an answer, last night. This is it. RKC is dead. Let it rot. Build something new. — Max Gladstone

What can we do in the face of fear? What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust. — Max Gladstone

We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles. — Max Gladstone

The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it's stupid about death. — Max Gladstone

You live in a grim universe."
"That's risk management for you. — Max Gladstone

Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing. — Max Gladstone

Your system kills, too. You're not eliminated sacrifices [to gods], you're democratized them - everyone dies a little every day, and the poor and desperate are the worst injured.

We honored our sacrifices in the old days. You sneer at them. — Max Gladstone

Land lied to the feet, and to the soul. You stand, it whispered, upon unchanging ground. You build upon certainty, and your foundations will never crumble. Ms. — Max Gladstone

They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signalled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic. — Max Gladstone

I've gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary. — Max Gladstone

The trouble with atheism," Temoc said, "is that it offers a limited range of curses. — Max Gladstone

Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn't matter so you don't have to worry about it. — Max Gladstone

You can win the world, she said, if you're willing to lose your soul. — Max Gladstone

Xxx you can't escape yourself, and you're the only thing that hurts you in the long run. — Max Gladstone

Contract for Services Rendered, Alt Coulumb Kos Everburning to Royal Iskari Navy," she translated. "Since the common names are all the same, each contract needs a unique reference so we can tell which one we're talking about. — Max Gladstone

And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She's a verb. — Max Gladstone

You people get so closed up inside those little brains. Their structure changes in response to thought, you know, like your muscles respond to use. The used parts bulk up. Bad training develops uneven strength; it takes time and painful work to balance unbalanced muscles. — Max Gladstone

Engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict. Tara — Max Gladstone

So you assume we go around painting ourselves with pitch and swooping from rooftops to devour innocents, and call ourselves things like Shale Swiftwing, Beloved of the Goddess, Scout-in-Shadows. — Max Gladstone

Justice is like math, anyone can think she knows the answer, but not every answer is right. — Max Gladstone

I'm on a quest, I think," he said, not having realised this before. "Or something like one."
"Those went out of fashion a long time ago. — Max Gladstone

You're my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerers who I'd happily gut on the altar of that pyramid and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you. — Max Gladstone

Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. "I told you so" had not been on the list. The — Max Gladstone

The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war." "Language, Elayne." "My apologies," she said after another sip of vodka. "One gets carried away when one feels one's dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error." * — Max Gladstone

Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women. — Max Gladstone

Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it. Resulting market fluctuations broke the Great Squid. Steve, the priest responsible, was promoted after the event, for exceptional skill managing a crisis, — Max Gladstone

She saw what lurked beneath his pleasant, confident exterior: a network of thorns in the shape of a man, a thing that wore him like a suit. — Max Gladstone

Everyone likes to be needed. — Max Gladstone

You need more wildness in your life. — Max Gladstone

Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad. There — Max Gladstone

She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face. — Max Gladstone

And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks. Up — Max Gladstone

A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. — Max Gladstone

The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you're a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your "kind", and neighbours who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation. — Max Gladstone

Knowledge," Tara replied, turning a page as quietly as she could manage, "is power. — Max Gladstone

Well, here we are. Let's change. Let's change the world. Together." "You sound like my father." "Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we'll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke." "You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first." "A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world." "I kind of like it the way it is. — Max Gladstone

Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie. — Max Gladstone

He sighed. "There is one thing you must understand about destroying gods, boy." "Only one?" "You must be ready to take their place. — Max Gladstone

You never appreciate things so much as in their absence. — Max Gladstone

To desperation," he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.
"And to bleeding hearts," she added, and they drank. — Max Gladstone

Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet. — Max Gladstone

His voice almost undid her. It was exactly as she remembered from school, casual, familiar, polite. Not arrogant, because arrogance implied one had to establish one's superiority. Denovo's voice assumed it. — Max Gladstone

It's art. If you're looking at it, it's working. — Max Gladstone

Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God. — Max Gladstone

Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven't been on a date since the late eighties. — Max Gladstone

Tongues and odors mixed on the air: Iskari and motor oil, sweat and leather, Camlaander and Archipelagese and some Shining Empire dialect like silk-muffled cymbals. — Max Gladstone

Humans need to dream, you know. It's how the mind breathes. — Max Gladstone

Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face. After — Max Gladstone

This is our second date."
"Some date. Fighting for our lives."
"We'll be fine," he said, without conviction.
"Yes." She sounded no more certain. "Next time, we'll go someplace nice. — Max Gladstone

A thousand prickling tender touches lit upon her, as if she was caught in a rainstorm and the raindrops were love. — Max Gladstone

We're occupied. We don't tak about it that way, but we are.

We're not occupied. We're a world city. There's a difference.

Are you sure? — Max Gladstone

Gods, like humans," he said, "are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and juice, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first. — Max Gladstone

For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some it crept into his bones. — Max Gladstone

Be careful. As if something's going to jump us in a library."
"You might be surprised."
"What do you mean?"
"You know how people say a book is really gripping?"
"Don't tell me ... " Cat trailed off.
"Libraries can be dangerous. — Max Gladstone

Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between flash and rumble felt in the body's core, was primitive man's first experiences of time
the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods. — Max Gladstone

You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power? — Max Gladstone

He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also," she said after a pause, "he moisturizes. — Max Gladstone

Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real. — Max Gladstone

We all think we're on our own side, until the time comes to declare war. — Max Gladstone

The bloom shriveled. No matter. Pride was dangerous, — Max Gladstone

Pulling her wrist from his mouth was as hard as turning from the gates of paradise. She fell back off the bed and sat down hard on the tile floor. The vampire snarled and rose to a crouch, silhouetted by the last rays of the setting sun. Her blood stained his lips and his chin. "What the hell were you doing?" Cat's mouth fell open. "What. I mean." He wiped the blood off his chin with his fingers and regarded it in fascination and disgust. "Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven't you ever heard of consent?" She — Max Gladstone