Ayla > Ayla 's Quotes

“How many feelings can one heart hold?... Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“And now the page before us blurs.
An age is done. The book must close.
We are abandoned to history.
Raise high one more time the tattered standard
Of the Fallen. See through the drifting smoke
To the dark stains upon the fabric.
This is the blood of our lives, this is the
Payment of our deeds, all soon to be
Forgotten.
We were never what people could be.
We were only what we were.

Remember us.”
― Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

“Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.
But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons—they can’t be danced round. They can’t be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars—they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves.”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“Don't worry. I am like most people. I can keep my eyes and still see nothing.”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“The courage of husbands is directly proportionate to the proximity of the wife.”
― Steven Erikson, Fall of Light

“money’s just an idea, it has power. Only it’s not real power. Just the promise of power. But that promise is enough so long as everyone keeps pretending it’s real. Stop pretending and it all falls apart.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal.”
― Steven Erikson, Fall of Light

“Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. ‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.”
― Steven Erikson

“Wanting to leave is enough.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation.
None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve.
To face death is to stand alone.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“She needs to be educated. She needs to know the contents of those books, there. She needs to understand the movements of the stars and the origins of the universe and the requirements of kindness. She needs to know mathematics and poetry. She must ask questions. She must seek to understand. She must understand the laws of cause and effect and unintended consequences. She must learn compassion and curiosity and awe. All of these things. We have to instruct her, Glerk. All three of us. It is a great responsibility.” The”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“The heart is built of starlight
And time.
A pinprick of longing lost in the dark.
An unbroken chord linking the Infinite to the Infinite.
My heart wishes upon your heart and the wish is granted.
Meanwhile the world spins.
Meanwhile the universe expands.
Meanwhile the mystery of love reveals itself,
again and again, in the mystery of you.
I have gone.
I will return.
Glerk”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“How many feelings can one heart hold? She looked at her grandmother. At her mother. At the man protecting his family. Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Why, without a sense of humour, you are blind to so much in the world. To human nature. To the absurdity of so much that we say and do.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things – once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Never mind the truth. The past is what I say it is. That is the freedom of teaching the ignorant.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“...and justice itself became a commodity, mutable in imbalance. Truth was lost, a chimera reshaped to match agenda, prejudices, thus cosigning the entire political process to a mummer's charade of false indignation, hypocritical posturing and a perverse contempt for the commonry. Once subsumed, ideals and the honor created by their avowal can never be regained, except by outright, unconstrained rejection, invariably instigated by the commonry, at the juncture of one particular moment of such brazen injustice that revolution becomes the only reasonable response.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“The world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“It was so pathetic, really, how so much violence came from someone feeling small. Small of mind, and it did not matter how big the sword in hand, that essential smallness remained, gnawing with very sharp teeth.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance. Accordingly, it presents an almost overwhelming temptation – how can I not be excused the occasional mockery?”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance…all the bastion of fools.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds