Matthew Stover Quotes

A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world--something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear--is nothing but a cheap hustle.

I gave them the word of a Jedi Master that if they surrendered I would keep them from harm. I will not be made a liar.

All true stories end in death.

(V.8) Del Rey, p. 214

And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.

It dawned on me then that Nick was proud of himself. Proud of what we had done. It may have been an unfamiliar feeling for him: that peculiarly delicious pride that comes from having taken a terrible risk to do something truly admirable. Of overcoming the instinct of self-presrvation: of fighting our fears and winning. It is the pride of discovering that one is not merely a bundle of reflexes and conditioned responses; that instead one is a thinking being, who can choose the right over the easy, and justice over safety.

He had no idea what he should do now. Without destiny to guide him, he was lost in a vast, whistling darkness. Any direction he might choose was purely abitary; it would make no more sense, offer no more hope, than would sitting still. Which offered neither sense nor hope at all.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

The feeling he'd had, that he was about to get himself killed, swelled into an overwhelming premonition of doom. Ganner's knees went weak, and a very large part of him wanted to bolt down the corridor and get away-but though he hadn't been much of a hero, the one virtue he'd never had to fake was courage.

Can't trust a fascist--truth is always your first sacrifice to the welfare of the state

...I suspect that pain means little to you as your life--but both your life and your pain are very important to me.

The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him only pain had meaning.

Our enemy is power mistaken for justice. Our enemy is the desperation that justifies atrocity. The Jedi's true enemy is the jungle.

When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.