Best 34 quotes of Max Gladstone on MyQuotes

A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.

A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.

All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries.

Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.

Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.

Anger’s hotter than a star, and endures where stars do not.

Deny me pen and ink until you can plug up the wellspring of my art.

Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

Even fear faded, incipient mortality giving way to the kind of drawn-out academic detachment that rendered “certain death” as “incipient mortality.

Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.

Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.

I love our Lord with all my soul, but the Church did well to give up on sex and focus on the burning.

It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.

No city is one city, as no one mind is altogether and only itself. A woman is many women, a man is many men, a city is many cities—not in sequence, but all at once.

Pain was a form of art, after all: a concentration of the soul, an extension of time.

People lasted as stories, as gods did. And people and gods alike told themselves stories as they died, because dying hurt, and stories helped.

Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women.

She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.

Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between flash and rumble felt in the body's core, was primitive man's first experiences of time -- the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods.

The key difference between gods and men in the manner of their dying was that men possessed only two deep obligations: to the earth, from which came their flesh, and to the stars, from which came their soul. Neither earth nor stars were particularly concerned about the return on their investment. Humans were very good at adding order to the earth, and enlivening the world of the stars with ideas and myth. When a human being died, nobody had a vested interest in keeping her around.

The people don’t care about theology. They are passion and fear and anger and they need gods to fuel that passion, soothe that fear, stoke that anger.

There’s no shame in general peace. Each specific peace holds its own.

The weak-willed gratified themselves with needless displays of power.

They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signalled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic.

They knew each other’s jokes, even the bad ones, and the weak points in their walls. That was why their fights were so harsh.

To desperation,” he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar. “And to bleeding hearts,” she added, and they drank.

To live is to grow secrets.

We are not complete in ourselves without others, without a world to complement our self-conception—and were we to become so complete, we could not bear it! The fullness of ourselves would break us. We burn. The point of Figment/Fragment/Filament”—claws spread to encompass the whole warehouse space—“is to reflect, refract the beauty of physical form, the glorious futility of our quest for complete knowledge, mastery, or independence.

What is this thing we call form, and to what extent do we comprehend our own forms? I have a form, surely, as do you, and let us grant that we’re both conscious even though certain philosophers would argue that assertion—fortunately they’re not here. So! Both conscious. But we have imperfect knowledge of our own forms, let alone our own selves—consider the human man, his last self-image formed at the age of twenty-five, surprised by wrinkles on his forehead as he looks in the bathroom mirror. Deathless Kings’ residual physicalities endure long after they’ve become skeletons—and they perform premortem exercises to stem mental fragmentation. You’d be surprised how frequently and how widely mental image and physical form differ.

You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf—when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.

You didn’t grow past the old things, just enclosed them like rings in a tree, so someone feeling the bark of you could suss out your old scars.

You live in a grim universe.” “That’s risk management for you.

You’re not who you think you are,” Viv said. “You’re a dream. That’s all. But don’t take it too hard. So are the rest of us.