Quotes from Tad Williams

You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell. -Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe--from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not?

After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

A man who will not listen carefully to advice honestly given is a fool. Of course, a man who blindly takes any advice he receives is a bigger fool.

Tangaloor, fire-bright Flame-foot, farthest walker Your hunter speaks In need he walks In need, but never in fear.

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.

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.)

Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.

A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

the road to Heaven is paved with bullshit and busy work.

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?

Stairs. This is Hell. Hell is stairs, was all Theo could think. I'd sell my soul for a goddamn elevator. But I don't have a soul, do I? I'm some kind of fairy. Okay, settle for an escalator, then.

I haven't met that many women, human or angelic, who actually like to drive. In my experience they seem to be much more pragmatic about the whole thing than we are. For most males, driving is an extension of their masculinity; they have little fantasy scenarios going all the time - races, chases, and dramatic combat with other drivers. Females, on the other hand, generally seem to view driving as something you do to get somewhere. I know, crazy.

Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.

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?

He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had.

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

You have to go down before you can come out — that's how these things always work.

Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.