Stephen R. Donaldson Quotes

Are you so ashamed of what you were?"
Bannon cocked a white eyebrow at the question, as if it came close to the truth. "I am not shamed," he said distinctly. "But I am saddened that so many centuries were required to teach us the limits of our worth. We went too far, in pride and folly. Mortal men should not give up wives and sleep and death for any service—less the face of failure become too abhorrent to be endured.

Then he grinned. “But it is said that hunger teaches many things. My friend, a wealth of wisdom awaits us on this journey.”

It was gray cold and dead from horizon to horizon under the gray dead clouds—not the soft comfortable gray of twilit illusions, of unstark colors blurring like consolation or complacency into each other, but rather the gray of disconsolation and dismay, paradoxically dull and raw, numb and poignant, a gray like the ashen remains of color and sap and blood and bone. Gray wind drove gray cold over the gray frozen hills; gray snow gathered in this drifts under the lees of the gray terrain; gray ice underscored the black, brittle, leafless branches of the trees barely visible in the distance on his left, and stifled the gray, miserable current of the river almost out of sight on his right; gray numbness clutched at his flesh and soul.

War puts burdens on people without caring whether they are ready for them or not.

He smiled because he was alive.

Do not be too quick to judge the makers of worlds. Will you ever write a story for which no character will have caused to reproach you?

It was clear to all there gathered that power is a dreadful thing, and that knowledge of power dims the seeing of the wise.

Don’t talk like a damned mystic. Say something I can understand.

Are you wise, Unbeliever?"
"Who knows? If I am—wisdom is overrated.

She said that it is the responsibility of the living to justify the sacrifices of the dead. Otherwise their deaths have no meaning.

Dreaming is like—it’s like being a slave. Your dreams come out of all the parts of you that you don’t have any control over.

Retribution—ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all sweet dark dreams.

We will soon know."
"Yes, indeed," Covenant muttered. "Only I hate surprises. You never know when one of them is going to ruin your life.

I loved you before that. I love you now. I’m just an unconscionable bastard, and I used you, that’s all. Now I regret it.

Yet this withholding of knowledge ran against every grain of his character. He believed intensely that the refusal to share knowledge demeaned both the denier and the denied.