Quotes from Brandon Sanderson

The difference between a successful thief and a dead thief is knowing when to escape with your takings.

You will love. You will hurt. You will dream. And you will die. Each man's past if your future. 'Then what is the point?' I asked. 'If all has been seen and done?' 'The question,' she replied 'is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You not pick the destination, only the path.

A man is what he has passion about.

Good lad. You did well, Spook. I'm proud.

Adolin might claim he was a different from his father, but in fact they were two shades of the same paint. Often, two similar colors clashed worse than wildly different ones would.

They're all Allomancers," Waxillium guessed. "More than that," Wayne said. "They're all relatives." "It's only been three hundred years since the Originators, Wayne. We're all relatives." "Does that mean you'll take responsibility for me?" "No.

I know what sarcasm is." Then she smiled deviously. "I know what sarcasm is!" Stormfather, Kaladin thought, looking into those gleeful little eyes. That strikes me as ominous.

The woman looked up at Lift. "He's right about that, um…" "Say it," Lift said. "Your Pancakefulness." "Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?

He wasn't so frightening, for a Voidbringer. He must have been like … the Voidbringer all the other ones made fun of for wearing silly hats. The one that would correct all the others, and explain which fork they had to use when they sat down to consume human souls.

Love must be allowed to flow both ways - if it is not, then it is not truly love, I think. It is something else. Infatuation, perhaps? Either way there are some of us who are far too quick to make martyrs of ourselves. We stand at the side, watching, thinking that we do the right thing by inaction. We fear pain - our own, or that of another.

It happens in the epilogues. The stories after the stories. Warriors who have fought return home, but find they no longer belong. The battle has changed them, warped them, to the point where they are strangers. They protected the society they love, but in doing so, made themselves into something that could never again belong to it.

A good officer was one who accepted orders and fulfilled them, even when he disagreed. But the mark of a great officer was that he also tried to innovate and offer appropriate suggestions.

It was his ability to trust," she said. "It was the way that he made good people into better people, the way that he inspired them. His crew worked because he had confidence in them—because he respected them. And, in return, they respected each other.

If Wayne isn't in here somewhere already," Wax said, "I'll eat your handbag and try to burn it for Allomantic power.

Lock a man in prison, and you might stop him from committing crimes. Teach a man to respect himself and his community, and you stopped everyone he might have taught, recruited, or bullied.

For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method.

Before the Wright brothers flew, flying was fantasy. Before the civil rights movement, people getting along together and the races being equal was a fantasy. Things change because we imagine a different world, a world that is not. And I think that imagination is one of the most important and defining aspects of human existence: our ability to imagine a world that is not.

She had to stop judging people. But was that possible? Wasn't interaction based, in part, on judgments? A person's background and attitudes influenced how she responded to them.

Not contradicting a point and proving it are different things.

It has always seemed to me," she said, "that a coward is a person who cares more about what people say than about what is right. Bravery isn't about what people call you, Spensa. It's about who you know yourself to be.

Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independent of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

I didn't know enough about human politics to know who was correct, but I did know enough about politics in general to guess that everyone would interpret the law in the way that best suited themselves.

It's always a dangerous thing for a writer to resurrect a character. It threatens to undermine the consequences in a story, and minimizes the risks characters take. At the same time, I knew Kelsier's story—in specific—was not yet finished. Readers sensed this. There was more to be told.

He found himself weeping. Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation. It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety. In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest painters, sculptors, and poets of any era. It was the greatest work of art he had ever witnessed. Gaotona