Felipe Held > Felipe's Quotes

“He shook his head pityingly. “This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.”
“Not all men are destined for greatness,” I reminded him.
“Are you sure, Fitz? Are you sure? What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I change the world today?”
“This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.”
“No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart's beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day?”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”
― Tad Williams

“Funny how a single word can change everything in your life."
"It is not funny at all. Steel is power. Money is power. But of all the things in all the worlds, words are power.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes,” I heard myself saying, “and suddenly know that life will be impossible without them. Know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat and that their company is all your happiness can ever desire and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft and lost.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King

“Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you'll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won't matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“It’s only in faerie tales that everything works out for the best with a magik spell or a prince’s kiss. It’s only in storybooks some little bastard picks up a sword and wields it like he was born to it. The rest of us? We have to work our arses off. And we might not ever taste triumph, but at least we dared to fail. We stand apart from those cowards whispering on the sidelines about how the strong did stumble, while never daring to set foot in the ring themselves. Victors are just folk who were never satisfied being vanquished. The only thing worse than finishing last is not beginning at all. And fuck finishing last.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“Wait for you? Not likely. I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me.

I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“Both honour and religion are things mortals use to justify atrocious deeds. To absolve themselves of the guilt they have so deservedly gained. They are more dangerous than any blade or any dragon. If a god tells a man to murder a child, they will oblige. It wasn’t their choice – it was the word of a god. That man is not a murderer – he is a conduit of divine will.”
― Ryan Cahill, Of War and Ruin

“Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Do you ever feel lost?” The question hangs between us, intimate, awkward only on my end. He doesn’t scoff as Tactus and Fitchner would, or scratch his balls like Sevro, or chuckle like Cassius might have, or purr as Victra would. I’m not sure what Mustang might have done. But Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father. “Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence."
He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names.
"Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal."
Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it.
I remember a different whipping.
"Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!"
There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy.
"Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not.
It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why, before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“I'm not really sure why. But... do you stop loving someone just because they betray you? I don't think so. That's what makes the betrayal hurt so much - pain, frustration, anger... and I still loved her. I still do.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“We are all dying, every moment that passes of every day. That is the inescapable truth of this existence. It is a truth that can paralyze us with fear, or one that can energize us with impatience, with the desire to explore and experience, with the hope- nay, the iron-will!- to find a memory in every action. To be alive, under sunshine, or starlight, in weather fair or stormy. To dance with every step, be they through gardens of flowers or through deep snows.”
― R.A. Salvatore

“There is no pain greater than this; not the cut of a jagged-edged dagger nor the fire of a dragon's breath. Nothing burns in your heart like the emptiness of losing something, someone, before you truly have learned of its value.”
― Robert Salvatore, Homeland

“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“They are not demons, not devils...
Worse than that.
They are people.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Wieża Jaskółki

“Honour’ is just a word. You can’t eat it or drink it and yet everywhere I go men talk of it endlessly, and they all tell a different tale of what it actually means.”
― Anthony Ryan, Blood Song

“Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket.
But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?”
― R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver

“Joy multiplies when it is shared among friends, but grief diminishes with every division. That is life.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Exile

“It's in silence we know ourselves, vampire. It's in stillness we hear the questions that truly matter, scratching like baby birds on the eggshells of our eyes. Who am I? What do I want? What have I become? Truth is, the questions you hear in the quiet are always the most terrifying, because most people never take the time to listen to the answers. They dance. And they sing. And they fight. And they fuck. And they drown, filling their gullets with piss and their lungs with smoke and their heads with shit so they never have to learn the truth of who the fuck they are. Put a man in a room for a hundred years with a thousand books, and he’ll know a million truths. Put him in a room for a year with silence, and he’ll know himself.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire