Sword And Sorcery Fantasy Book Quotes

“The mountains she’d viewed in childhood as nurturing have now taken on a menacing quality. Their stippled surfaces—the dark of trees rising from a background of white—give the impression of something more mythic than geological. Leviathans hibernating in the open, ready to stir at any moment and swallow her whole.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“The same moment the hiker comes upon them, rounding the bend in the trail, Harlan knows the man will die. He takes no pleasure in the thought. So far as Harlan is aware, he has never met the man and has no quarrel with him. This stranger is simply an unexpected contingency. A loose thread that, once noticed, requires snipping.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“Toward the back of the small property, Twentymile Creek flows through a ravine two to three feet deep and three times as wide. The waters of the creek, high and vigorous from recent rains, purl noisily around stones bearded with green moss and swatched with lichen. There she finds the body, stretched across the frothing stream.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“Junior finds what he’s seeking in a swale between two ridges. He glasses down at the elk from a hillside aflame with autumn color. The animal strides through the clearing about five hundred yards due east, dipping its head now and then to nibble on receding grass that soon will disappear for the winter.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“He sits up, grasps his carbine, and sneaks quietly from the tent. Outside the wind flows briskly through the trees, the shushing sound it makes like an admonition to them all.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“Finally, the sound fades and doesn’t return. Tsula sits alone in the quiet and the dark, shivering with such force that she fears her teeth might crack.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“From the scene arrayed before her now, Tsula knows this new body means something entirely different. The tight bunchings of onlookers in hushed conversation. The watery eyes and mouths covered by fingers. This is how people gather when the dead is one of their own.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“He tips his cap forward over his face and inhales deeply of the moist air. It seems to Harlan that he can smell the whole of these mountains’ lives in that single breath. The gentle notes of wild herbs and grasses, of seedlings introducing themselves to the world. Also the thick and bittersweet must of leaf litter, felled trees, and decaying animals returning to the soil.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“The current needs of survival leave little time for luxuries like sentimentality. It is, he figures, a kind of mercy. No time to dwell on what was lost when there is more yet to protect.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“Tsula and Abbott spy the cabin in a clearing beyond the trees. It appears almost spectral through the gossamer mist—at first, just a hint of a shape. A blocky shadow rising from the ground.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“Harlan chuckles to himself and shakes his head, as though enjoying a joke only he has heard. ‘Now I guess it’s only fair to warn you,’ he says. ‘This is not going to go the way you want it to.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“In the years that followed, Tsula would find that she could not recall that walk to the edge or the thrust of her legs into the air. Her clearest memory more than twenty years later is of the long, breathless wait as she fell, seemingly forever, and the water swallowing her at last. When she burst from its surface, unhurt, her mind noisy and electric, she grabbed for Jamie and kissed him hard.”
― Hank Quense, The King Who Disappeared

“You used to be so full of life, so happy, and then— men come back from war bent out of shape all the time, it is a given. But you, you came back to me like a phantom of your former self, you were not just bent out of shape, you were well and truly shattered. On the outside you are as hard as steel, you always have been, but you were a broken man.”
― Shauna Richmond, Shattered Steel

“You won’t leave? Fine…” Tristan steps over to the desk, picks up an oil lamp, and smashes it off the floor, a shard of glass rebounds, cutting his cheek but he does not so much as blink, “you can burn here,” he announces coldly as the flames begin to spread across the oak floor.”
― Shauna Richmond, Shattered Steel