Immortal Quotes

Look at the pattern. Those who are positive they know everything suppress and destroy those who disagree. But those who know they don't know explore and build and seek after wisdom. Stay a seeker...

- Geordi, Metamorphosis by Jean Lorrah

This is my personal selection of favourite quotes from books, movies and other sources. Some are meaningful, some are amusing, and some are just plain memorable.

Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophanes... and all of this... all of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars.

- Commander Sinclair, "Infection"

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

- Cordelia, Barrayar

One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.

- Aral Vorkosigan, Barrayar

Pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?

- Cordelia, Barrayar

Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

- Barrayar

No one knows their limits until they've gone beyond them.

- Miles Vorkosigan, Brothers In Arms

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

- Aral Vorkosigan, A Civil Campaign

Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.

- Mirror Dance

Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, but a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.

- Mirror Dance

Ah, the downside of perfect obedience: crippled initiative.

- Mirror Dance

He tried. He tried and failed, but no one else tried at all.

- Taura, Mirror Dance

Sometimes you can't give back. You just have to give on.

- Miles Vorkosigan, Mirror Dance

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

- Miles, Memory

His mother had often said, when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

- Memory

Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

- Aral Vorkosigan, Shards of Honor

I've always thought - tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

- Cordelia, Shards of Honor

It reminded him of that definition of his father's. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground, the stuff in between was just noise.

- The Vor Game

Only two places remain to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a non-entity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.

- Peekay, The Power of One

The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, often well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated... It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts.

- Peekay, The Power of One

Nothing that lives is without fear. It is a gift against recklessness, a servant against complacency in the face of danger. But like all servants it makes a bad master. Fear is a small fire in the belly to warm a man in the coldness of conflict. Let loose, it becomes an inferno within the halls which no fortress can withstand.

- the Deacon, Bloodstone

You know what I like about the young? Their passion for life, and their ability to see beyond the mundane. They don't look at the world and see what can't be done. They try to do it. Often they are arrogant, and their ideas fall from the sky like weary birds. But they try.

- Browyn, Dark Moon

I learned a long time ago never to give in to despair. Fortune may be fickle, but she loves a man who tries and tries again.

- Parmenion, Lion of Macedon

You can't make anyone love you and you can't keep anyone from dying.

- Kinsey Millhone, H is for Homicide

Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view. Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.

- Kinsey Millhone, I is for Innocent

With comfortable time to make any kind of decision we tend to cloud the issue with pros and cons, and are never quite sure, when we've cast the die, whether we've done right or wrong. Whereas intuition is as fast as light, flashing up from the subconscious with all the facts marshalled and the answer ready, if we're prepared to listen.

- Quiller, Quiller Salamander

You gotta do whatcha gotta do, right, but you also gotta live with it until it's had time to silt over like the rest of the rotten by-products of this bloody trade.

- Quiller, Quiller Salamander

Pull up the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, but the enemy within the citadel will undo you.

- Quiller, Quiller Solitaire

I don't like the nerves pulling tight when there's no reason, but I never ignore them. There are vibrations in human affairs that have nothing to do with speech or contact; they are there because the primitive brainstem still protects us in a world of technological sophistication, analysing the environment, interpreting data that the senses have picked up even without our knowing, and on that level we don't understand the signals; we just feel uneasy, on edge.

- Quiller, Quiller Solitaire

Maybe this is a kind of trial for us, a test, to see what we're made of. At the end of it, maybe we'll be judged to see how we've handled ourselves. And I think we'll only pass that test if we've acted with honour. If we don't do things out of greed or ambition or hatred or a lust for blood, if we keep testing all our decisions against our own beliefs, if we try to be brave and honest and fair... well, I think that's all that's expected of us. We don't have to be perfect, as long as we keep trying to be perfect.

- Robyn, The Dead of the Night

The more confident people are about their beliefs, the more likely they are to be wrong. It's the ones who are so certain, so black and white, the ones who never consider that they could be wrong or that anyone else could be right, they're the ones who scare me. When you're not confident at least you keep checking what you do and asking yourself if you're on the right track.

- Ellie, The Dead of the Night

This was a test. Everything was a test. Everything was a competition. Life put them in front of you every day. You watched yourself all the time. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right.

- Carpe Jugulum

The trouble about obeying orders is, it becomes a habit. And then everything depends on who's giving the orders.

- Brocando, The Carpet People

Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

- the Patrician, Guards! Guards!

The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

- The Hogfather

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.

- Maskerade

There is a labyrinth in the heart of every man; and to each comes the day when he must reach the centre, and meet the Minotaur.

- the priest, The Last of the Wine

The higher the dream betrayed, the deeper the bitterness; if the man survives, he will be on guard against dreams as a shepherd watches for wolves.

- Alexias, The Last of the Wine

What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will there is no land where the dead return across the river.

- Alexias, The Last of the Wine

History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has.

- Lestat, The Queen of the Damned

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple and yet indispensable things.

- Lestat, The Queen of the Damned

Each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment...

- Lestat, The Tale of the Body Thief

... Things that love night
Love not such nights as these; the wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves...

- Kent, King Lear

Give me my Romeo: and when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night.

- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet

I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness.

- Samuel, East of Eden

It is always easier to hate than to love, still more easy to hate a class or race of people because they are faceless and nameless.

- Saryon, Forging of the Darksword

Take control... Be the hero of your own life.

- Vasu, Into The Labyrinth

No one can live his life through someone else.

- Vlad Taltos, Teckla by Steven Brust

If not you, then who?

- Valentine, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Why should corruption be the province of the rich and powerful? In our new democratic system of government, the individual's rights to corrupt or be corrupted will be fully protected.

- the President, The Pattern of Infinity by Ana Dorfstad

He had a hero's talent for being in the wrong place, with the wrong people, at the wrong time.

- The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

I will return and I will be millions.

- attributed to Spartacus, Spartacus by Howard Fast

I'm mostly paranoid because someone's out to get me.

- Ken McKay, McLendon's Syndrome by Robert Frezza

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the centre of one's soul.

- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

Fear breeds violence, which don't breed nothing at all but bones.

- Isham, Telempath by Spider Robinson

Love may be the one forever feeling.

- Gabe, Goofbang Value Daze by Julian F. Thompson

Friends may come and go but enemies accumulate.

- unknown

Once is an accident,
twice is a coincidence,
three times is a conspiracy.

- unknown

Silence is consent.

- unknown

The one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.

- Yanakov, The Honor of the Queen by David Weber

The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity.

- Clancy, Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams