Esther Friesner Quotes

The shortest way to multiply damnations is to divide mortals. Fear’s a great one for that—fear the stranger, fear the different, fear the afflicted—long as you can keep your pigeons so damn scared there’s no room in them to even try to figure out whether there’s anything real to be scared of in the first place.

Sex is like the pursuit of wild mushrooms: Both are fascinating hobbies, both can prove most addictive, and both for the most part yield tasty results.
And yet, for the novice, there exists always the chance of making that one fatal mistake. Ah, but if one lives, one learns!

That didn’t really fit the facts or make very much sense, but as a theory it had a certain perverse appeal.

For magic wears a thousand masks, but love is magic of its own and wears a myriad more.

Don’t mistake gratitude for love.

Pigs possess a certain native intelligence and common sense by and large missing from our greater poets. When despair lays its clammy paws across their fevered porcine brows, they do not slump about composing sonnets; they take action.

I knew the Cardinal Rule of Experiments from Master Urion’s house: The wise mage never tampers with the order of things unless his circumstances are such that the worst possible result of the experiment will be no more disastrous than not performing the experiment at all.

Time had passed. It will, given half the chance.

What a hero!"
"What an idiot!"
"What's the difference?

Monkeys and mortals are attracted to sparkly things. What makes us different from the apes is that we sometimes crack the shiny shell and see there’s nothing inside.

When the majority is crazy, the sane ones are kept in asylums. She knew that well; she’d majored in World History.

Power can command wealth but wealth can’t always command power.

The wind had blown since before time had a name and it would blow until time lost all meaning. It blew the dwindling sands of the desert across the encroaching greenness of the fields and forests, past the teeming cities with their needle spires, silver in the glaring sun. It sang a dirge for all the waste that once stretched past the edge of imagination, and it moaned a lament for all who wandered, lost and outcast and alone.

It was an edifice that combined high tech and low taste to an astonishing degree.

Someone should either make the rewards of good better or the punishment of evil worse. Poor planning on a grand scale, I call it. Nothing but poor planning.