Jan Siegel Quotes

#1. Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It's like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again- you put on yourself-and then you know who you are.

Jan Siegel

#2. When ambition outstrips ability, that is always a recipe for disaster.

Jan Siegel

#3. You should never trust anyone completely," said Ragginbone, smiling a half-smile which snaked up one side of his face. "Unpredictability is a vital aspect of intelligence.

Jan Siegel

#4. And she knew she was not sure, she would never be sure, because uncertainty is the essence of the human condition, and death is the one barrier beyond which we cannot see. There is no hope but faith, no knowledge but the acceptance of ignorance.
Yet still she hoped that one day she would know.

Jan Siegel

#5. All things resist destruction, according to their capacity. Rocks, pebbles, diamonds. Unity is instinctive to being.

Jan Siegel

#6. The capacity for affection is the best part of humankind.

Jan Siegel

#7. Advice is a dangerous thing," the Watcher responded. "It should be given only rarely and cautiously, and taken in small doses with skepticism.

Jan Siegel

#8. I have often dreamed of strangling my Creator.

Jan Siegel

#9. I am only mortal, desperate, urgent. Spirits have endless ages in which to do nothing, if they so choose, but humans have death to hurry them on. Near or far, the end is always in sight. We have no time to stand and stare. Make your choice, Fernanda.

Jan Siegel

#10. And magic exists to break the rules.

Jan Siegel

#11. As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world.

Jan Siegel

#12. I am not tormented, Fern responded. I am ... diminished. I have always believed that your soul grows when you do something that is good and brave, a right thing, a true thing, and when you do evil- no matter what the motive- your soul is eroded. Well, my soul is less.

Jan Siegel

#13. Worst of all, she realized, Zohrane was without fear, and fear is the braking system of intelligence.

Jan Siegel

#14. Time is there for a purpose, to keep things in order. Once you change chronology you change history. The past could eat up the present ...

Jan Siegel

#15. You'd have to trust in Hope," said Fern. "Is that it?"
No," Ragginbone replied shortly. "Hope needs something tangible to sustain it. You would have to rely on Faith. Only Faith can endure in the teeth of the evidence.

Jan Siegel