Petrik > Books: arcs-and-review-copies‎ (555)

“Stories make sense. There’s justice in them. There’s none in real life.”

“There is much in life that is beyond our control, events that sweep us up and along, actions that wrap us tight in their consequences. Stop raging about the things you cannot change. Just be true to yourself and do what you can do. Love those worth loving, and to the Otherworld with the rest of it. That is all any of us can do.”

“Each small step taken for a greater good, and then before you know it, you have walked a thousand leagues from where you used to be. And how do you return to that place, return to the person you were? Or if you cannot do that, how do you become the person that you wish to be?"

“A person is made by their heart and their wits.’ He touched his one hand to his chest and then to his temple. ‘And by the deeds that they do. Their choices. Not whether they have pale skin or dark skin, wings or no wings. One hand or two.”

"We live our lives by Truth and Courage. Love and loyalty, friendship and honor are our guiding lights.”

“There is much in a name. A single word that stands for your very being and marks your time in this life.”

“Real war creates poverty, hunger, and disease on a massive scale. Ravaged towns and shattered lives are left in its wake. When this humanitarian crisis arises, who is there to care for those who have had everything stripped away? It is the doctors, the nurses, the volunteers willing to risk their lives to lend a hand. They walk bravely into the heart of danger bearing no weapon or any protection to speak of. And why? Because they know that they are needed.”

“You say glory, necessity, pride; I say barbarity, greed, arrogance. War is a search for glory, for that particular sense of joy and satisfaction that comes from staking one's life on the outcome of a gamble. The search for a cheap thrill, with a cost too dear for Midas, and on a pretext that, more or less, amounts to 'My neighbour has a thing. I want it.”

“War is a red haze punctuated by horror and death. It's a sequence of things that no human should ever have to know are possible, let alone see or have happen to them. War is neither a science or an art, it's a fucking mess, and the only sane response to it is to run fast in the opposite direction.”

“Honor lives on after you die. It’s the mark we carve on the world. It’s living fairly and respectfully. If you don’t live with honor, what’s the point?”

“War, she was finding, was nothing so much as a series of choices between bad and worse.”

“Men do what they want when they are in charge, and they tell themselves it’s right.”

“..while your thoughts are your own, the words you let past your lips belong to the world, and the world will not always take the meaning you intended.”

“Heloise Factor is my favorite kind of hero, the one who makes mistakes and suffers for them, and comes out swinging anyway. I can’t wait for you to meet her.” –Myke Cole

“That love is worth it. It is worth any hardship, it is worth illness. It is worth injury. It is worth isolation. It is even worth death. For life without love is only a shadow of life.”

“A wielder of words is a wielder of power.”

"If you care what others think to the point it defines your choices—defines your happiness and self-worth—you’re giving them power. Over you.”

“History is full of brutal and ruthless men. They usually call them ‘victors’.”

“His faith was not built from a belief in the existence of the Forgefather, it was from a need to set things right.”

“Nothing like being wanted, is there? Wanted by someone you want. Always seems like magic, that something can feel so good but cost nothing.”

“Believe it or not, we all want what’s best. The root o’ the world’s ills is that no one can agree on what it is.”

“Now all a man’s worth is how much work can be squeezed from him. We’re husks to be scraped out and tossed away. We’re cogs in the big machine.”

"She had long ago learned that at least half of everything is presentation. Seem a victim, soon become one. Seem in charge, people fall over themselves to obey."

“Why folk insisted on singing about great warriors all the time, Rikke couldn’t have said. Why not sing about really good fishermen, or bakers, or roofers, or some other folk who actually left the world a better place, rather than heaping up corpses and setting fire to things? Was that behavior to encourage?”