Tad Williams Quotes & Sayings

When your teeth are gone, learn to like mush. — Tad Williams

Besides, there was always hope, wasn't there? — Tad Williams

People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then? — Tad Williams

If the bears don't get you, it's home. — Tad Williams

Tangaloor, fire-bright
Flame-foot, farthest walker
Your hunter speaks
In need he walks
In need, but never in fear. — Tad Williams

Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger. — Tad Williams

God shapes us with a hammer of pain on an anvil of duty. I cannot imagine what shape we will be when He is finished. — Tad Williams

A proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit. — Tad Williams

COME AWAY, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you - yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short. — Tad Williams

I'm pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I'll purr at you, but I'll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you'd ignored me. — Tad Williams

All people know the Greater Hunger ... It is the hunger for warmth, for family, for connection to the stars and the earth and other living things ... "
"For love?" Renie asked.
"Yes, I suppose that could be true. — Tad Williams

You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony - who tells the last story. — Tad Williams

I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates. — Tad Williams

-You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell.
-Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe
from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not? — Tad Williams

In bad times, a king or a queen can be a rock for the waters to crash against, so those less strong are not washed away. I will be such a rock. Only give me a chance, sweet Zoria, and I will be a rock for my people. — Tad Williams

Now I end my death song. I give my farewell to mountain and sky. It has been good to be alive. — Tad Williams

These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they, could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. — Tad Williams

God gives us all youth, and the takes it away again. What have you gained to offset that loss? Patience? Perhaps a little wisdom? Then be patient, and perhaps you'll also be wise. (Miriamele) — Tad Williams

I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones. — Tad Williams

See, vodka, that's drinking. Beer - well, beer is just getting the inside of your mouth wet. — Tad Williams

Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been, to discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age. Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.
No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds. — Tad Williams

He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC. — Tad Williams

How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions. — Tad Williams

Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery. — Tad Williams

That is the problem with rumors," said Avin Brone. "It is very hard to prove that things are not true - much more difficult than proving they are. — Tad Williams

There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. ( ... ) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize. — Tad Williams

It's amazing the stupid things I say sometimes. I mean, you could start an entire branch of scientific research about the stuff I say that gets proved wrong while I'm still busy saying it. — Tad Williams

Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey. — Tad Williams

The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make. — Tad Williams

Good stories will tell you that facing the lie is the worst terror of all. And there is no talisman or magic sword that is half so potent a weapon as truth — Tad Williams

The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst. — Tad Williams

Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him. — Tad Williams

Has everyone gone mad?"
"Everyone was mad already, my lady," Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. "It is merely that the times have brought it out in them. — Tad Williams

People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about. — Tad Williams

Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me. — Tad Williams

It was only after they had left the bridge and its gaurdian far behind that Theo realized he had left Tansy's telephone-brooch in the pocket of his jacket. He had no plans to go back for it, of course: as far as Theo was concerned, that piece of two-legged ugliness was welcome to blow out Tansy's long-distance bill or download a ton of troll-porn and charge it to the Daisy commune.
Betray me, huh? Taste the Revenge of Vilmos! — Tad Williams

If you wish to carry a hungry weasel in your pocket, it is your choice. — Tad Williams

My parents were perfectly open-minded about everything. They never tried to convince us of what was true or what wasn't true in their minds. We were just presented with the information that was around and pretty much allowed - though, I mean, we knew how they felt. We knew they didn't go to church. So obviously that had an effect. — Tad Williams

A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it. — Tad Williams

I know, I know, numbers are not what you're interested in, except those of you who are engineers. — Tad Williams

But sometimes when things go very wrong and even the highest are frightened, innocence is not enough for salvation. — Tad Williams

Dear Diary
Went out shopping today. Picked up half a dozen sheep, two pigs, and a princess. The sheep are rather depressingly thin, the pigs and princess only slightly less so. Dear Diary
Went out shopping today. Picked up half a dozen sheep, two pigs, and a princess. The sheep are rather depressingly thin, the pigs and princess only slightly less so. — Tad Williams

We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take. — Tad Williams

You dog!" she said, so loud that half the crowded tavern turned to watch. "A few days past the walls of the inner keep and you think your pizzle has turned to solid silver? At least when Nevin Hewney falls asleep on top of a girl, drooling and farting and limp as custard, he doesn't pretend he's done her a favor. — Tad Williams

Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead. — Tad Williams

He was a figurehead - an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him. — Tad Williams

I pray that I lose my voice before my tongue ever shames me. — Tad Williams

After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form? — Tad Williams

Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival. — Tad Williams

Stairs. This is Hell. Hell is stairs, was all Theo could think. I'd sell my soul for a goddamn elevator.
But I don't have a soul, do I? I'm some kind of fairy.
Okay, settle for an escalator, then. — Tad Williams

Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once. — Tad Williams

You show her respect. That is a good thing," he said. "Too often it is that men think those who serve are doing it from inferiorness or weakness. — Tad Williams

Those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty. — Tad Williams

Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger; That is God

Piercing God's Hearte there is a Golden Needle; That is me — Tad Williams

Experience came easily enough, learning how not to suffer would have proved much more practical. — Tad Williams

There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not. — Tad Williams

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss. — Tad Williams

Theo knew enough about women and their clothes to recognize she was trying to strike an appropriate balance between ... what? Between liking him and hating him? Between wanting to look good and not wanting to look too available? Just because he knew a mixed message when he saw one didn't mean he knew exactly which messages were being mixed — Tad Williams

stupid people trying to manage me sends me into acute depression. — Tad Williams

Because love does not do sums, but instead make choices, and then gives its all. — Tad Williams

And you, a king's daughter, who willingly gave herself to me - who brought me to her bed? Are you so high and pure?" She — Tad Williams

Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy. — Tad Williams

Fear goes where it is invited. — Tad Williams

It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel ... — Tad Williams

There's sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That's the way it's meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time. — Tad Williams

It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked. — Tad Williams

Piglets and pawprints!" cried Eatbugs, then paused and looked quickly around. He leaned toward his companions. "Let's be off!" he added, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. — Tad Williams

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space. — Tad Williams

What, you don't have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did. — Tad Williams

A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good. — Tad Williams

If we do not reach our hands will always be empty. — Tad Williams

Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific! — Tad Williams

His virtual home showed none of the ostentation of others in the Brotherhood, no Gothic-fortress-perched-on-impossible-cliffs or Caligulean excesses of decor (usually accompanied by an equally Caligulean want of decorum.) — Tad Williams

If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God ... except for the aspirations of fallen angels ... — Tad Williams

Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary yet sufficient. — Tad Williams

Welcome to the Information Jungle. — Tad Williams

She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best. — Tad Williams

You are only a prisoner when you surrender. — Tad Williams

I thought ... I thought you might ... "
"Help you? By my grove, I am helping you. You're not starving anymore, are you? < ... > You had a dry night's sleep, too, and you're no longer coughing your liver and lights out. Some might count those as mighty gifts indeed. — Tad Williams

When it falls on your head, then you are knowing it is a rock. — Tad Williams

That is what I hate about ruling and royalty, Simon. It is living, breathing people with whom a prince plays the games of statecraft. — Tad Williams

Part of manhood, I am thinking, is to ponder one's words before opening one's mouth. — Tad Williams

He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom - a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward heroic, legendary feats of sweeping. — Tad Williams

Stories are the things people use to give the universe a shape ... there is little difference between a folktale, a religous revelation, and a scientific theor — Tad Williams

Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all. — Tad Williams

A well-aimed spear is worth three. — Tad Williams

Since your father has escaped my justice, it is you who must hear my words."
"Words. You keep saying ... "
"Because that was the gift your father gave to me. And the curse that ruined me as well, changed my life to wretched misery. There are hours yet before the guard comes - nay, eons. An eternity, in fact. This is my time, Miranda. Now you will have your words back: before I kill you, you will hear my tale ... and you will know what you have done. — Tad Williams

So that's what
one "yes," one "not sure," and one "I had had a dream about a bug. — Tad Williams

Briony's ladies-in-waiting kept their distance, as though their mistress had some illness which might spread - and indeed she did, Briony thought, because unhappiness was ambitious. — Tad Williams

For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before. — Tad Williams

During its timeless hours of movement and inspection, as it floated on the number-winds and learned from their shape and force, it had become aware of something else, something so far from the conceptual map of the environment it had originally been given as to briefly constitute a new danger to the Nemesis program's logical integrity. — Tad Williams

What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse? — Tad Williams

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men. — Tad Williams

Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out. — Tad Williams

So we face our final hours ... and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories. — Tad Williams

Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle! — Tad Williams

Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts. — Tad Williams

Books are a form of magic - " the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, " - because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. — Tad Williams

A wolf is clever-clever-clever, and they are as faithful as a debt unpaid. — Tad Williams

If you are going to without trust. men tasks to do, then once they have proved themselves, you should let them get on without you standing over them. There is no point in giving responsibility wifh — Tad Williams