Top 100 Tad Williams Quotes
#1. So we face our final hours ... and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.
Tad Williams
#2. To fight a war, you must believe it can accomplish something. We fight this one to save John's kingdom, or perhaps even to save all of mankind ... but isn't that what we always think? That all wars are useless - except the one we're fighting now?
Tad Williams
#3. Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts.
Tad Williams
#4. What, you don't have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did.
Tad Williams
#5. The road to Heaven is paved with bullshit and busy work.
Tad Williams
#6. Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That's what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions - if there is any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations.
Tad Williams
#7. It's always difficult when people compare me unfavorably with other contemporary writers. It's much easier when they use examples from earlier eras of fiction. Because then I can say, Well, I may not be talented, but at least I'm not DEAD.
Tad Williams
#8. Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build
but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?
Tad Williams
#9. Has everyone gone mad?"
"Everyone was mad already, my lady," Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. "It is merely that the times have brought it out in them.
Tad Williams
#10. For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.
Tad Williams
#11. He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.
Tad Williams
#12. People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?
Tad Williams
#13. Those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.
Tad Williams
#14. But remember this lesson, Simon, one fit for kings... or the sons of kings. Nothing is without cost. There is a price to all power, and it is not always obvious.
Tad Williams
#15. One of the fascinating things about researching Heaven and Hell is, of course, the fact that there are so few descriptions of Heaven, because most people can't really explain what it would be like beyond a couple of sentences, whereas Hell is quite often personal.
Tad Williams
#16. There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.
Tad Williams
#17. They were all becoming brothers, in the manner he had seen before: facing death together was the greatest of levelers.
Tad Williams
#18. When your teeth are gone, learn to like mush.
Tad Williams
#19. Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman's tongue? What good was beauty - a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless - if it cloaked such a viperous soul?
Tad Williams
#20. God grant me a quick honorable death, Isgrimnur prayed, and never let me be one of those old fools who sits by the campfire telling the young men that things will never be as good as they once were.
Tad Williams
#21. I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates.
Tad Williams
#22. Every time you open your mouth," Clarence said, "you just seem older and weirder.
Tad Williams
#23. Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.
Tad Williams
#24. People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.
Tad Williams
#25. I thought ... I thought you might ... "
"Help you? By my grove, I am helping you. You're not starving anymore, are you? < ... > You had a dry night's sleep, too, and you're no longer coughing your liver and lights out. Some might count those as mighty gifts indeed.
Tad Williams
#26. Weak dogs become bones for other, stronger dogs.
Tad Williams
#27. Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all.
Tad Williams
#28. A man whose wisdom is true does not sit in waiting for the world to come at him piece by piece for proving its existence!
Tad Williams
#30. You are only a prisoner when you surrender.
Tad Williams
#31. Part of manhood, I am thinking, is to ponder one's words before opening one's mouth.
Tad Williams
#32. Experience came easily enough, learning how not to suffer would have proved much more practical.
Tad Williams
#33. He was a figurehead - an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.
Tad Williams
#34. The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.
Tad Williams
#35. God gives us all youth, and the takes it away again. What have you gained to offset that loss? Patience? Perhaps a little wisdom? Then be patient, and perhaps you'll also be wise. (Miriamele)
Tad Williams
#36. You show her respect. That is a good thing," he said. "Too often it is that men think those who serve are doing it from inferiorness or weakness.
Tad Williams
#37. That is what I hate about ruling and royalty, Simon. It is living, breathing people with whom a prince plays the games of statecraft.
Tad Williams
#38. I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
Tad Williams
#39. We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.
Tad Williams
#40. I know, I know, numbers are not what you're interested in, except those of you who are engineers.
Tad Williams
#41. Just get up. What's your name, kid?"
"G-man"
"I don't mean your codename down at the Dickhead Club. What does it say on your driver's license?
Tad Williams
#42. COME AWAY, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you - yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short.
Tad Williams
#43. Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific!
Tad Williams
#44. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they, could force their will on the weak and peace-loving.
Tad Williams
#45. But a mouse can be brave. Small as they are, though, they learn it is wiser not to challenge the cat.
Tad Williams
#46. Good stories will tell you that facing the lie is the worst terror of all. And there is no talisman or magic sword that is half so potent a weapon as truth
Tad Williams
#47. You show me what someone listens to, I'll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)
Tad Williams
#48. stupid people trying to manage me sends me into acute depression.
Tad Williams
#49. I am a sandwich man. Somewhere early in life, my epigenetic switches got flicked to 'likes sandwiches,' and that's where they still are. I suspect it's at least in part because they're easy to eat while reading.
Tad Williams
#50. A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it.
Tad Williams
#51. Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!
Tad Williams
#52. What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?
Tad Williams
#53. In bad times, a king or a queen can be a rock for the waters to crash against, so those less strong are not washed away. I will be such a rock. Only give me a chance, sweet Zoria, and I will be a rock for my people.
Tad Williams
#54. Why were men so caught up with their honor, their solemn word, their promises?
Half the time the promises were never asked of them in the first place.
And yet the wars that were fought over such things, the hearts broken and the lands ruined..!
Tad Williams
#55. It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked.
Tad Williams
#57. If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.
Tad Williams
#58. I'm pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I'll purr at you, but I'll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you'd ignored me.
Tad Williams
#59. Were all these castle folk in their ornate finery no more than confused souls hiding inside costumes, as the hard shells of snails protected the helpless, naked things that lived within them?
Tad Williams
#60. All people know the Greater Hunger ... It is the hunger for warmth, for family, for connection to the stars and the earth and other living things ... "
"For love?" Renie asked.
"Yes, I suppose that could be true.
Tad Williams
#61. A piece of writing is a trap," he said cheerily, "and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive - which is knowledge - alive forever.
Tad Williams
#62. If you are going to without trust. men tasks to do, then once they have proved themselves, you should let them get on without you standing over them. There is no point in giving responsibility wifh
Tad Williams
#63. Sometimes I talk about baseball just to annoy people who don't understand it.
Tad Williams
#64. 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. The
Tad Williams
#65. If you wish to carry a hungry weasel in your pocket, it is your choice.
Tad Williams
#66. Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.
Tad Williams
#67. Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.
Tad Williams
#68. It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel ...
Tad Williams
#69. Perhaps a heart was indeed like a piece of dry birchwood, and could only take fire and burn brightly once - that any fire that came after would be only an ember, smaller and cooler.
Tad Williams
#70. But that is enough of such worrying. The river is waiting, and our hearts must be light, so we can faster travel.
Tad Williams
#71. The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst.
Tad Williams
#72. Kind of like I suspect things are at night in the It's A Small World ride, when all the little figures come to life and whisper about how they'd like to torture and murder all those screaming children and grinning grown-ups in the boats.
Tad Williams
#73. Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.
Tad Williams
#74. Stories are the things people use to give the universe a shape ... there is little difference between a folktale, a religous revelation, and a scientific theor
Tad Williams
#75. Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary yet sufficient.
Tad Williams
#76. Besides, there was always hope, wasn't there?
Tad Williams
#77. Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger; That is God
Piercing God's Hearte there is a Golden Needle; That is me
Tad Williams
#78. Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out.
Tad Williams
#79. As I said, Princess, I am a writer, and as all know, that is another name for a fool.
Tad Williams
#80. Books are a form of magic - " the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, " - because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm.
Tad Williams
#81. He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom - a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward heroic, legendary feats of sweeping.
Tad Williams
#82. Piglets and pawprints!" cried Eatbugs, then paused and looked quickly around. He leaned toward his companions. "Let's be off!" he added, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.
Tad Williams
#83. Now I end my death song. I give my farewell to mountain and sky. It has been good to be alive.
Tad Williams
#85. If your enemy comes to speak bearing a sword, open your door to him and speak, but keep your own sword at hand. If he comes to you empty-handed, greet him the same way. But if he comes to you bearing gifts, stand on your walls and cast stones down on him.
Tad Williams
#86. Because love does not do sums, but instead make choices, and then gives its all.
Tad Williams
#88. When it falls on your head, then you are knowing it is a rock.
Tad Williams
#89. You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony - who tells the last story.
Tad Williams
#90. Welcome, Simon, to the world of those who are every day condemned to thinking and wondering and never ever knowing with certainness.
Tad Williams
#91. There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. ( ... ) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize.
Tad Williams
#92. She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.
Tad Williams
#93. For all the things we've seen ... my goodness, the world still has more to show us, doesn't it?
Tad Williams
#94. That is the problem with rumors," said Avin Brone. "It is very hard to prove that things are not true - much more difficult than proving they are.
Tad Williams
#95. Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.
Tad Williams
#96. I'm tired of being lost and I'm tired of dying, so I'm going to try something different this time.
Tad Williams
#97. I guess you don't want to leave copies of Genocide Illustrated out for the UPS guy to see.)
Tad Williams
#99. Though talent is wonderful, dance is 80% work and 20% talent.
Tad Williams
#100. But sometimes when things go very wrong and even the highest are frightened, innocence is not enough for salvation.
Tad Williams
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