Matthew Stover Quotes

If no mistake you have made, yet losing you are... a different game you should play.

He was moderately sure that a thirteen-year-old boy who'd load up four other children and set out in a steamcrawler across the Korunnai Highland at night-a boy who'd rather die than leave an unconscious girl behind-had guts enough for just about anything.

Mace flipped up a thumb. "You think being armed and ruthless means you can do whatever you want." He folded his thumb and flipped up his forefinger. "You think nobody will stand up to you when they're naked." He folded that one again and flipped up the next. "And you think you're going to look inside my bag."

Mace stared at the man as though he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't: only now, finally, was he seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have had resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine.

This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating.

I don't have to be a hero, he thought in silent wonder. All I have to do is pretend.

Here was the weapon of a hero. A real hero. Not a playactor. Not a pretend-hero, like Ganner had always been. But this weapon was now in Ganner's hand.

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.

"I guess heroes feel like they've accomplished something." <br/k> "And you haven't? Several thousand slaves might disagree."

You can kill me, but you can't make me obey.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

Shit, kid, thinking about that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like I just ate a kitten.

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.

The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them--but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey."

We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.