C.S. Friedman > Quotes

“I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant).”
― C.S. Friedman, When True Night Falls

“Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.”
― C.S. Friedman, In Conquest Born

“Tomorrow could not get better if one failed to survive today.”
― C.S. Friedman, Feast of Souls

“What is a child?" he asks her.
The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.”
― C.S. Friedman, Feast of Souls

“There is no such thing as redemption, my friend. There is right, there is wrong, and there are a million shades of color between the two. Once you've done wrong, it is always with you. You just have to try and be better.”
― C.S. Friedman , Black Sun Rising

“anger of any kind is a dangerous emotion, it eats at the nerves and eventually makes you careless”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“All data leaves a trail. The search for data leaves a trail. The erasure of data leaves a trail. The absence of data, under the right circumstances, can leave the clearest trail of all.”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“The more complex our security becomes, the more complex our enemy’s efforts must be.

The more we seek to shut him out, the better he must learn to become at breaking in.

Each new level of security that we manage becomes no more than a stepping-stone for him who would surpass us, for he bases his next assault upon our best defenses.

It is a ware that can never truly be won… but one we dare not lose.”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“Look," she told me. "A good kreda is very hard to find. I invested a lot of time and memory in you. I had no intention of giving all that up, just because you were going to be in a bad mood for a decade or two.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“In a world where data is coin of the realm, and transmissions are guarded by no better sentinels than man-made codes and corruptible devices, there is no such thing as a secret.”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“He’d once had to fight off a pack of ghouls in below-zero weather with nothing on but a pair of socks, and it wasn’t an experience he was anxious to repeat. He”
― C.S. Friedman, Black Sun Rising

“How much blood was being made to flow for that last show of elegance?”
― C.S. Friedman

“Morality is the constant of human existence.”
― C.S. Friedman, Black Sun Rising

“We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward.” … “Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“Only in summer-phase is it carnivorous.”

If there was an award for understatement, I thought, the Tyr would trounce all competition.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“My identity is without root.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“Evil is what you make of it, the Prophet had written. Bind it to a higher Purpose, and you will have altered its nature. And: We use what tools we must. Damien”
― C.S. Friedman, Black Sun Rising

“It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru.

What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“God save us from an Earth in which all men are the same. God save us from a colony where that is the goal, or a culture which assumes that for its norm. Give me a thousand people speaking different tongues, worshiping different gods, and dreaming different dreams, and I will make of them a greater nation than you can make with ten thousand of your gengineered duplicates. For mine will have the spark of greatness in them, while yours will live for conformity, worship mediocrity, and take their carefully modulated delight in predigested dreams. Reigning in Chaos: the founding of Guera Colony (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“I stood balanced on the brink of madness. Insanity and longevity are a truly terrifying combination; if I gave in now, I might pay the price for centuries to come.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“Temptation is an insidious beast, that devours a man by stages. He doesn’t wake up one morning and think to himself, "Today I will betray the world". His soul is corrupted bit by bit, a thousand featherweights of hope and fear and doubt settling onto him one by one... Until the combined weight of them is more than his conscience can bear. And then, one day, that conscience finds that it no longer has a voice, and only the temptation remains.”
― C.S. Friedman, Legacy of Kings

“He was good at ignoring things; it was a skill all iru had. A lifetime of dealing with senses that tended to go haywire had taught him how to shut down the part of his awareness that was causing irritation.”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“An uninspired ruler works to develop those relationships which will be most to his advantage. A great ruler determines the most desirable relationships and assumes them into being.”
― C.S. Friedman, In Conquest Born

“The gods, he knows now, will not help mankind. If they even exist—which he is no longer certain of—it is clear they do not care what happens. Perhaps they will even applaud when the last monuments of the Second Age of Kings crumble to dust, and the men who once worshiped them are reduced to the level of beasts. Perhaps that is what they intended all along.”
― C.S. Friedman, Wings of Wrath

“Fear would come in time, no doubt, but that did not mean she had to issue it a formal invitation.”
― C.S. Friedman, Wings of Wrath

“Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by advertisements and "free" offers and icons that would take you to another site, unasked-for, the moment you gave them your attention? It was like wending your way through an obstacle course. Perhaps after a while you just learned to tune it all out... or perhaps you could buy programs that did it for you. He would have to design himself one of those before he did any more real work on the outernet, though he suspected that the consumer programs which were stalking him were capable of adapting to anything he could turn out quickly.

Advertising: the ultimate predator.

He longed for the simplicity of the Gueran network, which simply did what it was supposed to and no more. When had these people lost touch with the fact that the purpose of a network was to facilitate communication, not impede it?”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore

“I dreamed of a beast in human form, that hunted men for pleasure. When they brought it down—at last, after many deaths—they cut it open. Only to find a wormlike thing coiled in a bed of slime at the center of it, where the heart should be, and a webwork of puppeteer’s strings leading outward through the flesh. I screamed.”
― C.S. Friedman, The Madness Season

“What is true genius, if not the perfect balance of inspiration and perseverance?”
― C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore