Best 13 quotes of Scott Davis Howard on MyQuotes

And speaking of fair, why is it we use A new set of words for female abuse, Different from men, and twice as offensive, That often puts women upon the defensive? And their best defense, sometimes is attack And then they all hurl the same insults back Upon other women, and judge them as harshly As they were once judged, incredibly starkly, And so they begin the whole cycle once more

I don’t know,” Scot offered. “Being a hero feels fair and fine to me.” Mordred turned to him and looked him up and down under his dark brows. “That’s because you’re young, inexperienced, and living in the sunrise glow of a moment of glory. Enjoy it, fellow, while it lasts. You’ve accomplished something that you’ve longed to achieve and felt was an impossible dream since childhood. You’ll have the best half-year of your life (if you’re lucky) and then the glory of this moment will set beyond your horizon. You’ll be left empty, questioning everything, and wishing for a challenge to equal the old. It is the central cycle of every ambitious man’s life—it is the reason he seeks and achieves glory, and the reason that one day his own glory grows too heavy and crushes him, especially as he gets too old to bear its weight.

I fully realize that all men and women who are in love lie to themselves to one degree or another. Love, I’ve found, whitewashes its object. Any blemishes, crevices, or cracks are filled with pure and bright illusion, the root of which is vanity. Only over time does this brightness wear off.

I know. You are about to say that Satan lifts up the evil lords to thwart God’s power (that’s the standard argument, I believe) but you can’t have it both ways. If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. Mordred and Malestair and their ilk are part of God’s plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude, one Hell of a mistake—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil.

I suppose he never gets blisters, then,” Scot murmured, then looked up and said, “And in truth, one of the reasons that I’d rather retain my code and my religion is that my gods are flawed and hypocritical. They get blisters—metaphorically. Thor wrangles with rage and Loki with jealousy. The only perfect god, Baldr, was killed for his perfection, which of course proves that pure perfection is an imperfection, or . . .” Scot hesitated, “something like that.” Even he felt that he could have summed that up better. “There’s pagan wisdom for you,” Gawain scoffed in derision. “Perfection is imperfect and imperfection is preferable. It’s circular logic.” Scot rolled his eyes, rubbing his ankle. “Paganism (as you condescendingly call my faith) is circular. Your Christianity tries to make everything into a straight line… in order for your world to make sense, everything must have a start and an end. In any case, your king is cut from the same cloth as your Christ—both are like Baldr, too good to last for long—either you are blind or he is a liar. Real people and gods struggle to be their best and fail.

I think you’re wrong. Most of us don’t choose to believe. We believe because we have to. Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?

I warn you, my cynicism is so strong that it borders on optimism.

Life ends with death for each of us—for kings, and slaves, and gods—we are tied together by the final knot of death and failure, so there is no reason to look down on any other or for the gods to be patronizing or judgmental. We all lose. We all fail. We all die. But we all fight, and struggle, and defeat is not refutation.

So you truly believe in nothing?” she asked. “No,” he coughed. “I don’t believe in anything—which isn’t the same as believing in nothing. Belief in nothing, it seems to me, takes quite as much faith as belief in something. I am utterly incapable of that kind of commitment.

The holly grove, carved a century ago by the druids, was designed to amplify emotion to a cathartic crescendo. You see, druidism (as did most early religions) realized the essential truth that faith is an emotional, rather than a logical, response to the world. They designed their places of worship around this fact. Love, fear, guilt, rapture, these are religious words. Believers feel their belief. Skeptics contemplate their doubt.

Women don’t place as much value on what can be seen with the eyes as men do—it fades, you see, and the man who is an attractive fool at twenty becomes simply a fool by fifty.

You cannot be a great bard unless you’ve had at least one great experience, and you cannot sing of valor, villainy, heroism, loss, love, or betrayal unless you’ve experienced them firsthand.

You know, that’s the trouble with humanity—half of the dreamers want to carry us forward, kicking and screaming, into an unrealistic and unattainable future, and the other half want us to fall back into an imaginary ‘simpler time’ when everything was easy.