Jordan West

“There was nothing new that could happen and he didn't understand why more people could not come to this realization. The same things are born and the same things die and the same river flows and the same fire burns. The same hearts break and the same fools rise. There was a gift in such knowledge and he allowed it to carry him without regard to provocation or concern for consequence as if he was only a chess piece being moved about the world.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Lay Your Armor Down

“The twentieth century imposes its own special brand of monotony whenever it’s given a free hand, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is capitalist or socialist or fascist; either way, the end result is a sort of Levittown of the mind.”
― Lawrence Block, Tanner's Twelve Swingers: An Evan Tanner Mystery

“Our teachers and troubadours stuffed our minds with the tales of our fathers - Aristotle and Arthur, Christ and Chretien. Our swordmasters swelled our thews with the steps and strikes of our fathers' fathers. Our thoughts tread again the paths first cut by our forebears' minds. Thus we hop and hew in the image of our fathers, and the fathers of our fathers. How might we then count ourselves new men, and not but shades of elder days, fleshed afresh in gaudy youth? Do we martyr ourselves upon knighthood's altar of our volition, or does some greater mind print its thumb upon us and so mold us into familar shape? What will lies within? What choice? Are we men, or the echoes of men, seeded once and springing forever from the same tired earth, watered forevermore by chivalry's iron unguent?”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“People are crazy for some sort of assurance that the visible world is not the only world, which is an almost intolerable state of mind.”
― Robertson Davies