Wiley Lanzarin

“Mr. Hooks?”
“Mr. Ludefance? Pleasure to meet you and thank you for coming in.”
As he extended his hand to me, I noticed the girl at the desk staring at my face. Hooks looked back at her staring and must have given her a look of some kind.
“Mr. Ludefance, this is my secretary, Cholia.”
She stood up and continued to stare at my scar. Black hair, cute face, maybe five-foot-four at the most, and a little on the plump side with rosy cheeks. Young. Very young. Looked like a teenager to me. Or was I just getting ‘older?”
― Behcet Kaya, Appellate Judge

“The faith itself was simple: he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“And in that moment, I was hit with the realization that this delicate layer of atmosphere is all that protects every living thing on Earth from perishing in the harshness of space.”
― Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

“I would have hoped you would have learned by now. No matter, a man who refuses to face his destiny offers himself to the GOD of chance—and chance is a wayward bitch.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity