Bran > Bran's Quotes

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”
― Stephen Fry

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan

“I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking

“I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”
― Douglas Adams

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― Carl Sagan

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“We shouldn't have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“Learning starts with failure.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“gossip was the theater of the uneducated,”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.”
― George R.R. Martin

“We look up at the same stars and see such different things.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling

“But no. There is a difference between the truth and what we wish were true.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Cruelty never helped the turning of the world.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.”
― Philip Pullman

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King