Alexander Wales > Quotes

“Depression is easy to wallow in and hard to fight against, but if you just give in to it completely it's a downward spiral. You skip going to class because you're feeling depressed, then you stay in the rest of the day because you've already missed one class, then you skip the next class because you already missed the first one, and you stop answering your phone because people are asking whether you're okay and you don't want to talk to them, and it just gets worse from there. That spiral doesn't have to happen, and thinking in the right ways even though you're depressed is one of the big things that halts it.”
― Alexander Wales

“I got that same glorious hit of ecstasy, like the opposite of getting hit in the face with a frying pan.”
― Alexander Wales, Book I

“And of course that was an Amaryllis that was never going to exist, one that I could never talk to or thank. I longed for her, even though I only knew her through her words.”
― Alexander Wales

“Fenn, under no circumstances will I ever even consider having sex with a giant six-eyed deer.”

“But you’re thinking of the logistics of it now, aren’t you?” asked Fenn, gently patting my hand.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle

“I can imagine”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle

“Melanie cried, but only a little bit. She had gained quite a bit of experience with crying over the past few years. She could at least console herself that she never cried at trivial things; no book had ever brought her to tears. Instead, it was deaths, debts, and abandonment that moved her to tears. The world had simply decided that it didn’t particularly like Melanie Masters, and that was an appropriate thing to cry about.

In the end, Melanie did what she always did after crying. She got to her feet, said a silent curse, and went back to work. The world didn’t like her, but she didn’t like the world either. It would be impossible to burn the whole world down, so the only other option was to carry on as though she weren’t losing a small piece of her soul with every attack the world made against her.”
― Alexander Wales, Glimwarden

“Many of the museums were small and cluttered, barely curated, clearly someone’s crap, but Perry had a fondness for those sorts of museums, the ones that popped up because someone had turned a collecting hobby into something more.”
― Alexander Wales, Teaguewater

“I think my compulsion to go with is at least partially grounded in the need to exert control, rather than the actual utility I can provide, and in the interests of not doing things simply for the sake of doing them, I would rather stay here.” She touched the book like it was her lover.”
― Alexander Wales, Building Strongholds

“Perry’s mother used to say “Well we got along without all this modern stuff for a long time,” but she’d been wrong, people hadn’t gotten along, they’d simply died from their wounds and everyone else had gotten along without them.”
― Alexander Wales, Teaguewater

“If I spent time focusing on every shitty thing in my life, I wouldn’t have time to get anything done,”
― Alexander Wales, Trust and Consequences

“I think you get excited,” he’d said. “I think you have an active imagination. Most people don’t intend to lie, but their storytelling instinct gets the better of them, and they think of the things they didn’t say at the time but which make them sound better, or they exaggerate what happened, and it builds over time. And then they think there’s no harm in it.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 3

“You went from hurting people deliberately to hurting them accidentally. Next step is not hurting them at all, and the step beyond that is actually helping them.”
― Alexander Wales, The Infinite Library

“There was a sense of loss that came from exiting a dungeon, a sense that the dream was over and real life had to resume.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 2

“There was a part of Isra that felt good when Verity was gone, and she didn’t particularly like that part of her. It was a feeling that was hard to put into words, but she had been getting better about putting abstract things into words lately, and practice made perfect. When Verity was gone, it felt like there was suddenly much more time, more world to explore, and while Isra loved Verity, deeply, she also loved the sense of, well… freedom, she supposed. It racked her with guilt though, to think of Verity being gone as ‘freedom’, but it was the sensation that came through her, if she was understanding her own emotions correctly.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 3

“So you’d want to map it out, is what I’m sayin’.” “You would,” said Alfric. “Did you?” asked Mizuki. “Because you’re Mister Planning, it seems like. Does one of those pockets contain a plan?” “It’s complicated,” said Alfric. “The matter of what’s in your pockets is complicated?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow. “I have a map,”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 1

“...on balance, more good than bad, but it wasn’t a calm neutral, it was the good and bad smacking up against each other like two warring armies, ...”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle

“being a druid,” she went on, a bit sad to let the idea of ‘woods witch’ die, “is kind of like being a sorc, I think, where people have all these ideas about what you’re like and what you do, and none of it changes that you’re just a person with your own stuff going on. You don’t need to be the way that other people think you should be.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 1

“I don’t want to be a plant that you grew from a seed, resting all its weight against your trellis. Not just for fear of what would happen if you were ever gone, though obviously that’s a part of it.”
― Alexander Wales, Building Strongholds

“There was a cool impassiveness to the way she apologized, as though she wasn’t actually sorry, but Verity had known her long enough to know that this was just how Isra was.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 3

“I read the books very quickly, and might have missed something,” said Bethel, “Did Hermione give Ron a handjob?”

“This is too vulgar,” said Amaryllis. “And no, she didn’t.”

“It’s implied in the text,” began Valencia.

“Is it?” asked Amaryllis in disbelief.

Valencia huffed. “Well, you have to understand that the books were written for children, but given that sexual curiosity is completely normal in the early and late teens, their close proximity with one another, their history of dating others, then yes,” said Valencia. She folded her hands. “The lack of explicit sexual activity probably has more to do with the marketing of the books and the social mores of both the author and audience.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle

“ said Isra. Her saying that made Mizuki feel a little pleasantly warm. It was true, obviously, but maybe she also liked that Isra appreciated Alfric. Hannah laughed. ”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 2

“Babble stones,” I said, after Zona had gone silent. “Hold one in your hand, and anything you say comes out as gibberish to anyone listening. But if someone holds a matching one, your gibberish will be perfectly comprehensible. Not terribly powerful, but there are a few use cases.”
― Alexander Wales, Building Strongholds

“She had laughed when Perry had asked her how it was possible that she’d invented all those things and explained that there was an era when lone polymaths could found entire fields and write seminal works that would be used as reference for centuries, but that they were long past that.”
― Alexander Wales, Teaguewater

“There was a song, she recalled, about a man who sat down to rest for a moment and then realized a decade later that he had once been moving, but was so covered with moss and leaves that he couldn’t get up. It was her favorite kind of song, a jaunty tune about a depressing subject.”
― Alexander Wales, This Used To Be About Dungeons: Volume 1

“And who should see the truth but you and I?”
― Alexander Wales

“on and on until you have hundreds of voices arguing with varying strength that the imperial law is either good and bad, and eventually the vote gets decided by some combination of money and influence rather than whether it’s actually good policy.”
― Alexander Wales, Through Adversity

“This was the sort of thing that I had always dreamed about seeing, not the intense displays of magical power, but someone using what was probably meant to have been a monster in a dungeon somewhere for a mundane task. One of the things that I liked about Aerb was that it was settled and lived in; the first thing that I would have thought of when I came across an ooze like that was domesticating it for use in the bone trade, and someone else had already had that thought, and done the domestication, and now it was just part of the fabric of the world.”
― Alexander Wales, Trust and Consequences

“You like to race ahead,” said Amaryllis. “And even when your observations are sophomoric, it’s the energy and enthusiasm with which you do it that I find charming.”
― Alexander Wales, Building Strongholds

“which meant that she was at least partly raised by the internet, and not the best parts of the internet either. To my knowledge, she never fell in with the kind of people who were on the lookout for impressionable pre-pubescent girls, but she did find a lot of those incestuous websites that have built up their own obsessive mythologies, rituals, and words of power. There were times when she was talking when she would drop in some random bit of deep lore from one of those places, or use a turn of phrase that no one around her was at all familiar with. Sometimes we asked her to explain, but mostly we ignored her, in part because her explanations made it clear she expected us to have read some obscure creepypasta or watched five seasons of a show someone had given a glowing recommendation to. (I’m aware that this is me saying that, trust me, I am, but when I dropped my references, it was either with the necessary background, or with the intent that no one would be able to connect. With Maddie, it was pure social disconnect, like she didn’t realize that other people had internal lives of their own.)”
― Alexander Wales, The Infinite Library

“These thoughts weren’t fully articulated in his mind before he went through the portal. It was, instead, mercurial and amorphous, just the bare idea that he needed to take the opportunity before it slipped through his fingers in one way or another. They were thoughts that happened after the doing, not before.”
― Alexander Wales, Teaguewater