D.C. McNeill > Quotes

“Did you know, Maynard, that there is nothing worse than a disloyal friend? A disloyal friend is not truly a friend let alone a person. Empathy, integrity, and reliability make for good friendship, Maynard. But a friend is no friend without loyalty. Without loyalty, those friends are more like flowers. They might be beneficial. Perhaps they make life easier for you. Perhaps, even, they make you happy.

But all of that is incidental as it is incidental for a flower to grow. You never had to ask the flower to grow. The flower doesn’t have the foresight to grow because you desire it to. The flower grows only for itself.”
― D.C. McNeill, Maynard Trigg and The Creature Beneath The Veil

“The boy will keep the sunboy.’
‘I already owe enough favours.’
Moony chuckled and reclined. ‘The boy may find need of a light for the dark places.”
― D.C. McNeill, Maynard Trigg and The Creature Beneath The Veil

“You don’t have to save the world to make a difference,
sometimes you just have to get up in the morning and put one foot in front
of the other. And accept that things are not the way you want. You can’t
undo the end of the world. You can’t magic yourself to a different city. You
can’t fix things with grand gestures. But you can wake up and move the dial
a little each day. That’s all any of us can do: put the weight on our shoulders,
secure the package, and get going.”
― D.C. McNeill, Palerunner: A collection of essays about world building, CRPG’s, love, loss and many other kinds of literary vulnerability

“I wanted to make a mystery that unravelled across a world severed from the ground, one that wasn’t tied to ideas I could readily copy. Not with mages and dragons but with people in a world moving on from their kind, and with characters as unlikely as those I grew up knowing.”
― D.C. McNeill

“And that’s courage for the next time. And the next time. And inch by
inch, you drag yourself back. Mend the knife-marks until they’re silver scars.
Mop the floors until the tiles are not longer stained, and you do that once
a fortnight now, because their shitty off-whiteness that collects far too
much dirt and dust won’t beat you. You fix the small bits, one at a time.
When you look back, you see the trail of black, oozing sick that you’ve
tracked from the pit, all the way to here. It’s been a long, brutal journey.
And yet, looking around, you’re shoulder to shoulder with your people,
who have the same tools and same luck as you. You beat the odds, inch by
inch. You haven’t won, not really, there’s no such thing, but you’re alive.
You get to keep going.”
― D.C. McNeill, Palerunner: A collection of essays about world building, CRPG’s, love, loss and many other kinds of literary vulnerability

“Violence and beauty are intrinsically linked. It’s people, regular humans making choices in systems, in unknowing collaboration with time, that change the world. Not spirits of the forest or an all seeing god or saints or fairy stories, just regular folk. Pentiment seems to ask, again and again, why isn't this enough? The beautiful, natural world and the people within it. Why diminish us with cheap myths and gods when we are all here. Why can't we be enough. Regular folk loving and hating and bickering and caring and trying. Always trying. Which is all any of us can do. Try to live. Try to live well.”
― D.C. McNeill, Palerunner: A collection of essays about world building, CRPG’s, love, loss and many other kinds of literary vulnerability

“Above all, we share the silence. The moment in the small hours once
the woman in the hoodie has hung up the phone and gone inside. The
minutes after the couple a few blocks over retire, their argument stowed,
mistaking accord for reconciliation. When the record reaches its end, and
Mister Withers spins down - may he never be forgotten. When all the cars
are safe in their homes and all the people are safe in their ports.”
― D.C. McNeill, Palerunner: A collection of essays about world building, CRPG’s, love, loss and many other kinds of literary vulnerability

“The Cook arrived sometime in the small hours of the morning. The moon was high but falling, and the air had taken to chill. Our lamps were out. Clement snored.
The front door creaked. I didn’t move.
The Cook crept in. His yellow cloak hung in threads, trail-worn, his apron smeared in dark brown and crimson stains—I hoped it was not Edwin’s blood. Dark circles under his eyes, a scratchy, unshaved beard, dirt under his nails so black it was opaque, and flaked skin made him more creature than man.”
― D.C. McNeill, The Retrievers of Windsor: A Maynard Trigg Story

“They called me Mad Red for a time,’ Master Uskore continued, as if Maynard had never spoken. ‘In my youth, due to my propensity to overindulge in research and experiment, but what I yielded from those years was unprecedented, and the insight I gained into our world is unparalleled. I was only able to achieve such grandeur by applying the tools of the Detector. True, we live on these platforms and we know much of their mechanics, but why? Where does Dust come from? What was the ground before—was there a before? These questions, Virgil.’ Master Uskore stepped forward. His eyes widened, red at the edges. ‘We will discover the truth. No matter the cost. And you will learn how, and you will help us. You must, for knowledge is all that separates us from… Knowledge is alive. It is a fire. Fire is not evil, by itself, but how it is applied may cause great harm. Or, great joy. It is ours to recover. You must learn this discipline or be consumed by the fire itself.”
― D.C. McNeill, Maynard Trigg and The City of Whispers