Quotes from John C. Wright

What if they found a trapdoor out of this dead universe? A hole? A black hole? A place where the tyranny of time and space couldn't reach?

Do you understand the lesson of the sword and the charge I have laid on you?" "Yes, mother. Kill heretics, don't sleep around, obey the king. But… we don't have kings in America, and I think being a heretic is protected by the First Amendment.

Vrys' First Law: If you deny reality, you must invent a fantasy.

They are not one whit disaccommodated by the fact the sun they follow with such effort is a false one.

For as 'Wright's Ninth Rule of Writing' states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not.

He sat up. He was naked as a jaybird, but someone had thoughtfully provided a flint-napped dagger hilted in rawhide, as well as a solid, flint-headed spear, so he did not feel weaponless. So someone knew something about human psychology, or at least his psychology. But not enough to have also provided a loincloth.

The sensation of a baseball bat to the face was not any more pleasant when it came from an unexpected direction, without warning.

And this help? It includes things as subtle as somehow tricking our astronomers into calling M44 the Beehive Cluster just to freak out the bee creatures living there, on the off chance that I would come along and mention that? How in the world could anyone arrange that coincidence over so many eons and lightyears?

Reasoning by analogy is like filling balloons with liquid helium. It won't fly.

Sea Fairies! Great! So there is an intelligent species of humanoid supernatural beings living in the Mediterranean that I happen to be related to, and you never mentioned it to me. And there are other groups living under mountains, fighting over the weather, and what day it is going to snow because one side wants to cause starvation and the other side wants diseases." "No. One side wants pride and envy. The other wants wrath and sloth.

I am not going to call the alien brain I am stuck inside of by the name I am totally buggered—this damnified thing is in my brain like a devil from hell—and it is reading my thoughts, eating my goddamn mind! AAARRGH! For one thing, it is too long." Perhaps it could be called simply AAARRGH! That was much shorter.

If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics.

They say Cat was the last of all to leave Eden and was less afraid of the Seraphim than Lucifer, and for that reason, to this day, is permitted to stare at kings, unabashed.

What you intend and what you do not intend have smaller import than you might suspect. The question is not what you shall do with life but what life shall do with you.

We are men born in a land of eternal darkness. We grope where we cannot see clearly. Why mistrust what ancient books say? Why mistrust what our souls say? Our forefathers gave us this lamp, and the flame was lit in brighter days, when men saw further. I agree the lamp-light of such far-off lore, is dim for us; but surely that proves it to be folly, not wisdom, to cast the lamp aside: for then we are blind.

The armor he wore was not the dueling armor he had expected. The breastplate was chased with a design of red and gold fusils or lozenges, quartered with scallops and roses, and about the whole figure writhed the three-headed Serpent of Aulis, with three sparrows above, wings spread as if in frantic flight, tiny gold beaks open. The baldric was inscribed with letters of gold. N'Oubliez. Never forget.

Montrose shook his head. "M3 never said anything about a duel, nor any of the Dominions me and mine conquered and combined into the Archon of Orion. The Throne of Milky Way did not think it was a duel." "Milky Way is a Mowgli galaxy: an ignorant barbarian.

By the time the Milky Way collided with Andromeda, the war between them, for all practical purposes, was over.

The seneschal said in panic, "Stop that man from talking! He is a lawyer!

Apparently these new rulers of the world did not indulge in any drinking or smoking to soften their moods when they met, which Menelaus knew to be a big mistake. The Congress of the United States, back before the Disunion, always met sober, and look at what had come of that.

Looming above their groves and plantations, the massive mansions of Patricians reflected an austere design of rectilinear geometry, with many a pillared portico, ambulatory, or chalcidicum of unsmiling caryatids circumvallating solemn cloisters, crowned with entablatures ordered by the golden mean, or belvedere, tower, and clerestory windows reflecting the Fibonacci sequence

Penny was a very pretty, witty and brave girl, as bold as a Marine platoon storming Iwo Jima.

You think you know someone your whole life, and he turns out to be a German-gypsy interdimensional dark elf spy who can cloud men's minds. Go figure.

Dr. Henry Templeton got the drop on me after I killed his grandfather before he was born. Apparently, that wasn't enough to stop the bastard.