Stephen R. Donaldson Quotes

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.

He no longer accused himself; he knew then that no one could be blamed for being inadequate in the face of such unanswerable malevolence. Destruction was easier than preservation, and when destruction had risen high enough, mere men and women could not be condemned if they failed to throw back the tide.

Abruptly Loerya joined the probing. “And if there is no Creator? Or if the creation is untended?”
“Then who is there to reproach us? We provide the meaning of our own lives. If we serve the Land purely to the furthest limit of our abilities, what more can we ask of ourselves?”

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

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.

Power was dreadful and treacherous. When it was not great enough to accomplish its wielder’s desires, it turned against the hands which held it.

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.

You know, where I come from, the people who did this to a forest would be called pioneers—a very special breed of heroes, since instead of killing other human beings they concentrate on slaughtering nature itself.

The prevailing breeze from the Forest blew into his face, and for the first time in many days he was able to distinguish the tang of the season. He found that the autumn of the Land had turned its corner, traveled its annual round from joy to sorrow. The air no longer gleamed with abundance and fruition, with ripeness either glad or grim. Now the breeze tasted like the leading edge of winter—a sere augury, promising long nights and barrenness and cold.

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.

If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather hear something that makes sense.

That's madness!" Covenant gasped thickly. Elena's gaze wavered on the edge of focus, and he could not bear to look at her. "Do you think that some existence after death is going to vindicate you after you've simply extirpated life from the earth? That was exactly Kevin's mistake. I tell you, he is roasting in hell!

I was trying to give her something, make it up to her somehow. But that doesn’t work. When you’ve hurt someone that badly, you can’t go around giving them gifts. That’s arrogant and cruel.

No one person has the right to withhold knowledge from another. No one is wise enough.

I have no special virtue to make me resent him. One must have strength in order to judge the weakness of others. I am not so mighty.