Max Gladstone > Quotes

“I have observed friendships as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate behavior, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“A desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self . . . . is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“The trouble with atheism," Temoc said, "is that it offers a limited range of curses.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Words can wound, but they're bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also,” she said after a pause, “he moisturizes.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you’re a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your “kind”, and neighbours who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“If we're to be at war, we might as well entertain one another.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She's a verb.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“Be careful. As if something’s going to jump us in a library.”
“You might be surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how people say a book is really gripping?”
“Don’t tell me…” Cat trailed off.
“Libraries can be dangerous.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“It’s art. If you’re looking at it, it’s working.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“So in this letter, I am yours.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some it crept into his bones.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we’re caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.”
― Max Gladstone, Full Fathom Five

“Words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“A thousand prickling tender touches lit upon her, as if she was caught in a rainstorm and the raindrops were love.”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“You live in a grim universe.”
“That’s risk management for you.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever

“Adventure works in any strand- it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war.” “Language, Elayne.” “My apologies,” she said after another sip of vodka. “One gets carried away when one feels one’s dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error.” *”
― Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

“A shadow follows her. She has no proof, but she knows, as bones know their breaking stress.”
― Max Gladstone , This Is How You Lose the Time War

“You need more wildness in your life.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“You never appreciate things so much as in their absence.”
― Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise

“She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.”
― Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever