John French > Quotes

“But they are many and he is alone.
This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet.”
― John French

“The first wall of any fortress was the mind, and doubt could burn it from within before the enemy had even raised a blade.”
― John French, The Solar War

“The world goes quiet and warm.
I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness.
Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers.
He tries to raise his sword.
He is falling…
He was…
… running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers.”
― John French

“The first steps of damnation are always wrapped in the costume of piety.”
― John French, The Absolution of Swords

“At the root of your lies, is there any truth, father?’
The darkness becomes a forest, dark trunks reaching to an untouchable sky, roots crawling out and down into the abyss beneath. The man on the chair is sitting on the snow-covered ground, a fire burning before Him. A shadow moves out of the dark between the trees. It is huge, sable-furred and silver-eyed. It drags its shadow with it as it comes forwards. It pauses on the edge of the light.
‘You claim to be a man,’says the wolf, ‘but that is a lie revealed to any that can see you here. You deny you wish godhood, but you raise up an empire to praise you. You call yourself the Master of Mankind, and perhaps that is the only truth you ever spoke – that you wish to make your children slaves.”
― John French, The Solar War

“Do not pity those who are lost on the path. Pity those who reach its end, and see at last what they were seeking."

- Malcador the Sigillite”
― John French, Ahriman: Gates of Ruin

“Show me a living soul that believes that he has choice in anything, and I will show you the universe’s greatest fool.”
― John French, Ahriman: Unchanged

“‘Who are you to say that I may not sit at this hearth? Am I not as you? Did we not once break bread, laugh, bleed and weep together? Am I not the one who set off into the world at your side till paths and time set our steps towards different suns? Am I not returned to this place called home, weary with time and the weight of the sword? Is the only rest you would give me that of the bed of knives? Shall we not sit and talk and remember that once we were brothers?’
– from the Voice of the Stones, pre-unification Terra, exact era and author unknown”
― John French, Cthonia's Reckoning

“It was always that way with cruelty, Sigismund knew — it did not have to sacrifice, or struggle; it had only to be patient.”
― John French, Sigismund: The Eternal Crusader

“We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.”
― John French

“Oh, small light that is this soul, shine in the dark undimmed…
Oh, great light that is all, shine for this soul so small…
Oh, small light that is hope, shine for all that will see…
Oh, small light that is this soul, shine in the dark undimmed…
Oh… small… light…”
― John French, Incarnation

“We are all nothing until we decide what to become.”
― John French

“We are what we choose to be."

- Rogal Dorn”
― John French, Praetorian of Dorn

“He opened his eyes to the real world. Everything was moving with the slowness of a broken pict screen. Around him the Exiles of the Thousand Sons stood in the ruins of Tizca. Above him lights swelled within the storm cloud as the shells fell from the heavens.
He reached up to his chest. The cracked back of a jade scarab found his fingers. His mind was suddenly empty, suddenly still. He felt the stone of the jade scarab. It was warm to his touch, just as it had been before, when Prospero had died under the axes of the Wolves. He knew that perhaps he alone of his brothers had kept that broken memento of their first flight from Prospero. Then it had unified the Legion, as Magnus had given the last of his power to save those who survived.
Now, Ahriman did not need it to draw his brothers together. They were him and he was them. But the scarab mattered. It was not a connection to his brothers. It was a connection to the past, a connection to that first journey across space and time, a connection to the bridge that Magnus had created between Prospero and their refuge in the Eye. A key to opening that way again.
You cannot step in the same river twice, he thought, the ancient words rising unbidden to his mind. Above him tears of flame fell from the frozen sky.
For it is not the same river.
He gripped the scarab and closed his eyes.
And you are not the same man.”
― John French, Ahriman: Unchanged

“Victory is not fate. It is an act of will.'

Primarch Rogal Dorn”
― John French, Mortis

“Claims of innocence mean nothing: they serve only to prove a foolish lack of caution.’
– Judge Traggat, Selected Sayings, Vol. III, Chapter IV”
― John French, Divination

“The truth, Zardu Layak, is the greatest force in the universe. It is not kind. It is not a shield against cruelty. It is the most dangerous thing you can hold, and it is all that matters.”
― John French, Slaves to Darkness

“Hindsight makes us all seem fools.”
― John French, Hounds of Wrath

“Can I change the future, or do I make it certain by trying?”
― John French, The Lies of Solace

“Service, loyalty, honour, these are both the
debt and the payment.”
― John French, Tallarn: Siren

“The deed is not all that matters. The reason is what matters.”
― John French, Sigismund: The Eternal Crusader

“The past is not ours to own. We think, because we can remember it, that it belongs to us, that we can go back to it, that we are the same person who lived those moments, breathed that air, and made those choices.
We are not the same.
We are a stranger living with memories that belong to someone else.
And the past belongs to itself.’
– Kallista Eris, from manuscript notes on the development of history, suppressed”
― John French, Ahriman: Unchanged

“Abandon the limitations of what you think is possible and you are left with a universe that is truly infinite. That realisation is the root of all power. Cage your mind with the possible and you have stolen your own future.

- Rumination of the primarch Magnus the Red,
recorded in the Athenaeum of Kalimakus”
― John French, Ahriman: Sorcerer

“To leave is to arrive.
To arrive is to leave.”
― John French, Ahriman: The Dead Oracle

“Death… is… not… atonement,’ said Boreas. ‘Not even… now… at the end…’ Sigismund felt something cold tighten within him. Boreas’ gaze had gone distant; the rhythmic beat of the pumps rose, labouring. The tubes and flasks gurgled and sputtered. The fluid in the jars was dark. ‘You… atone… by… living… until… until the last… blow… of the sword.”
― John French, The Solar War

“The angel had looked at him for a long moment, the eyepieces in his cracked helm an emerald glow in the dark. ‘It is the Death Lament of Baal,’ he had said, at last. ‘The song of passing from the world.’ ‘You are singing of your deaths because you know we will die here?’ ‘To die is our purpose.”
― John French, Mortis

“It is not often that we get to learn from the mistakes of the past."

Rogal Dorn”
― John French, The Solar War

“Now you see,’ said Yesugei. ‘We are made to be greater than the humanity we serve. The weight of the blade is nothing to us. To ride and fight and bleed for days is nothing to us. Nothing to us… We are made higher and so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child’s eyes knows – that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear – not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder… Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.”
― John French, Mortis

“That’s what happens when you are born of a realm without time. Everything happens. The order of it means nothing.”
― John French, Ahriman: The Omnibus

“The fortress that crumbles may have stood against every enemy until the last.”
― John French, The Maiden of the Dream