Sean DeLauder > Quotes

“For all their simplicity, humans could be remarkably perceptive, though they didn't know it most of the time, and their ability to thrust straight through deception and see to the heart of truth was often lost with childhood. By adulthood humans had trained themselves to be coy and manipulative in response to the coy and manipulative society in which they lived, which led them to believe that everyone was trying to be as coy and manipulative as themselves and were uncertain about what was true and what was not. Beyond their few flashes of clarity, everything became a muddle of colliding doubts.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“A name isn't important. It doesn't make you, you make it.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Most distinguishable about the idiot, Hedge noted, was their fear of that which was different. Those who feared difference always made a point of finding difference in others in order to feel more secure in their sameness.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“It was easier to scribble over memories a person didn't want to remember, so they searched for these people - the abused and neglected.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“History loved to lie, through simple distortion or complete fabrication. Lies were the cosmetics of history, and when history could not be beautiful, it preferred to be shocking.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Most people tacitly agreed to permit cruelty rather than risk being subject to it.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“That was the nature of hope. Sustaining, but of little practical purpose besides.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“That was my cathartic moment - when I realized humans have difficulty believing in themselves, but if someone believes in them, they can accomplish anything.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“At that moment he understood, far better than he had before when he studied their histories and their political structures before he arrived, what it was to be human. Their whole existence was centered upon suffering. That was the first time he considered humanity's massive potential. They made frequent mistakes, yes, but if those mistakes were adequately painful they made every effort to avoid repeating them, to improve upon their errors. To be more careful so they didn't catch their thumb under the hammerhead.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“Evil became invisible when it was everywhere. Like air, everyone forgot it was there until it was blowing hard enough to knock off their hat or muss up their hair.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Was it right to extinguish those few bright spots for the sins of the many? On the other hand, was it okay to spare all the foul corruptions for the sake of a few?”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“The single most frustrating and saddening aspect of human life is its shocking brevity.”
― Sean DeLauder

“Hedge was enthralled by her symmetry, yet the word was too cool and dry. She was beautiful.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“It was an ignorant perception of the past at which most scoffed, but those who were wiser simply shook their heads in embarrassment knowing similar fears and ignorance confronted them in different forms now.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Speaker for the Trees

“Do you know what the biggest sexual organ in the human body is?”
“Oh!” Harry slapped his hand on the end of a thick, chest-high fencepost. “Is it my—”
“It’s the mind,” Violet interrupted, jabbing a finger into the side of her head.”
― Sean DeLauder, Sexsassins

“Charms and oaths and guardian spirits were all the product of a need for something to believe in because people didn’t believe in themselves, a need to let problems resolve on their own rather than confront them. People were predominantly fearful of disruption, even of the things they found overbearing, even as they attempted to wish them away. It was why they invented heroes. It was why the world suffered through long periods of stagnation between innovations. Because rather than change the things that needed change, people preferred to cower and wait until a hero arrived to do it for them. Assuming by that point it was not already too late.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“I call this tree Pinocchio," he said.
Harden and Violet stared at him, awaiting an explanation.
"Why?" asked Violet.
His mouth twitched mischievously and he drummed his knuckles against the bark. The sound knocked loudly among the leafless trees.
Violet's mouth had screwed up into an incredulous knot and her mouth began to move, but Harry did not wait.
"Hear that?" he asked. "It has a woodpecker.”
― Sean DeLauder, Sexsassins

“Like most organic creatures, like humans or little brown monsters, emotion provided fuel for activity, which allowed maintenance bots like Tim to take pleasure in his chores, despair at the undoing of his work, and frequently discuss how, if he had been permitted to design himself, the first thing he would have addressed was an inconvenient lack of eyebrows.”
― Sean DeLauder, A Hero

“Hope was always creating pleasantly ideological, and therefore impossible things.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“That, of course, was what made it such a brilliant trap. It appeared susceptible to the dim; beautiful to the empathetic. A foolish hero would walk gladly into the trap. A wise hero would turn away. A great hero would punch through to the other side and emerge with the throbbing core of the place clutched in one hand.”
― Sean DeLauder, A Hero

“That was the mark of genuine beauty. Not being beautiful oneself, but making everything around them beautiful.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Want your words to live forever? Write them on your pants in mustard.”
― Sean DeLauder

“Most people gladly blended into the unoffending beige of humanity.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Doubt was a giant-sized beast with heavy boots that pounded through the cities of the mind, sparking an occasional life only so Hope could rise again for a splendid recrushing. Doubt reveled in nothing more than destroying Hope. And Hope, being immortal, lived out its days with blithe indifference to its regular obliteration. Neither cared at all about the suffering they caused: Doubt because it enjoyed suffering; Hope because it was too stupid to recognize it.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“A smile broke across his face, joyous and wide as he gazed back at the girl, and it was as he was thinking anything capable of fashioning something so beautiful could not be Evil that he smashed into the building at the end of the path.”
― Sean DeLauder, A Hero

“The single most disappointing and saddening aspect of human life is its shocking brevity.”
― Sean DeLauder

“Harry reached the vehicle and stopped. Violet climbed off his back like a lank-limbed gibbon and slid onto the front seat. Tex pushed himself back against the frame of the vehicle and his feet backpedaled even though there was nowhere else to go.
“Relax, sweetie,” she purred in her gravelly voice that sounded as if her larynx had been marinated in an ash tray.
“Y-you’re what they were keeping hidden here, aren’t you?”
“Got that right. But I don’t bite.” Violet set a hand on Tex’ leg and exhaled a cloud of smoke from the corner of her mouth. She raised a slender black eyebrow and pinioned him to his seat with her eyes. “I breathe fire.”
― Sean DeLauder, Sexsassins

“People clung to memories and legends, loving them because they went on forever, and people loved the eternal, hoping there might be something eternal in themselves.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“Unless was a sword held carefully by the blade. A single slip and all the delicate designs could fall apart in a clatter of severed fingers.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Least Envied

“A society that resists the change necessary to improve itself endorses dysfunction because part of it benefits from dysfunction and is in essence a criminal society.”
― Sean DeLauder, The Last Case: A Joseph Tey Mystery