Tad Williams Quotes

You can never tell when princes will get squinty on you. You can never tell when they might suddenly feel their blood and go all royal.

He wanted a home desperately. He was close to the point where he would take a mattress in Hell if the Devil would lend him a pillow.

Sometimes you men are like lizards, sunning on the stones of a crumbled house, thinking: “what a nice basking-spot someone built for me.”

Sometimes doing the gods’ bidding required a hardened heart.

The manchildren, the mortals, have many ideas of what happens after they die, and wrangle about who is right and who is wrong. These disagreements often come to bloodshed, as if they wished to dispatch messengers who could discover the answer to their dispute. Such messengers, as far as I know of mortal philosophy, never return to give their brethren the taste of truth they yearn for.

Strangely, although the world is already full of fearful things, mortals seems always to hunt for new worries.

She had been dressed in her sky-blue gown and had been suddenly almost terrible in her completeness—so different from the ragged serving girl who had slept on his shoulder. And yet, the very same girl had been inside that blue dress.

No charm is proof against a dagger in the back.

Perhaps it is fortunate that most heroes who die for their people cannot come back to see what the people do with that hard-bought life and freedom.

There are three kinds of people—the living, the dead, and those at sea.

Empires were like seawalls, he thought sadly, even those which embodied the best of hopes. The tide of chaos beat at them, and as soon as no one was shoring up the stones any more...

“I have not slept well since I first entered my brother’s dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then, worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest.”
“There are many kinds of imprisonment,” Jarnauga nodded.

Ambitious men never believe others aren’t the same.

Now, boy, now..." he said bewilderedly, "what is all this talk of glory? Have you caught the sickness, too? Curse me for a blind beggar, I should have seen. This fever has cankered even your simple heart, hasn't it, Simon? I'm sorry. It takes a strong will or practiced eye to see through the glitter to the rotten core.

When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren’t many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity—a waste of precious time and effort.