Tad Williams Quotes

Light, with its handmaiden color, was everywhere.

The spider hung motionless, like a dull brown gem in an intricate necklace. The web was complete, now, the last strands laid delicately in place; it stretched from one side of the ceiling corner to the other, quivering gently in the rising air as though strummed by invisible hands.
For a moment Isgrimnur lost the thread of talk, important talk though it was. His eyes had drifted from the worried faces huddled near the fireplace in the great hall, roving up to the darkened corner, and to the tiny builder at rest.
There’s sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That’s the way it’s meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time.

Thank you, Duke," the troll said seriously. "May your god be blessing us indeed. We go into unknown places."
"As do all mortals," Josua added. "Sooner or later.

If you have not noticed, we are preparing for war. I’m sorry if that inconveniences you.

Perhaps he was a bumpkin; at least he was an honest bumpkin.

Sharp it away, lad, sharp it away," the burly guardsman said, making the blade skitter across the whetstone, "lest otherways ye'll be a girl afore ye're a man.

“Is this being in love?” he suddenly wondered? It was nothing like the ballads he had heard sung—this was more irritating than uplifting.

Ambitious men never believe others aren’t the same.

As he silently approached the last float, a latticework ball of reeds, he offered an unspoken prayer to He Who Always Steps on Sand that even now the little bottom-walkers were pushing and shoving their way into the cage below. Because of his unusual education, which included a year living on Perdruin—unheard of for a Wrannaman—Tiamak did not really believe in He Who Always Steps on Sand anymore, but he still held a fondness for him, such as might be felt for a senile grandfather who often tumbled down from the house, but once brought nuts and carved toys. Besides, it never hurt to pray, even if one did not believe in the object of prayer. It helped to compose the mind, and, at the very least, it impressed others.

Not being stupid is important.

“Neither War nor Violent Death,” Morgenes had written, “have anything uplifting about them, yet they are the candle to which Humanity flies again and again, as complacently as the lowly moth. He who has been upon a battlefield, and who is not blinded by popular conceptions, will confirm that on this ground Mankind seems to have created a Hell on Earth out of sheer impatience, rather than waiting for that original to which—if the priests are correct—most of us will eventually be ushered.

The wise man is not waiting for the realness of the world to prove itself to him. How can one be an authority before the experiencing of this realness? My master taught me—and to me it seems chash, meaning correct—that you must not defend against the entering of knowledge.

It would please me your not being obsequious. That is a trait of marketplace people who are selling shoddy goods. I am sure to prefer endless, stupid questions to that."
"Ob...obseek...?"
"Obsequious. Flattering with oiliness. It is not liked by me. In Yiqanuc we say: 'Send the man with the oily tongue to go and lick the snowshoes.'

We trolls say: “Make Philosophy your evening guest, but do not let her stay the night.”

This fellow," he indicated the woodsman with a sweep of his stick, "will reliably not become more alive, but he may have friends or family who will be unsettled to find him so extremely dead.