Quotes from John C. Wright

Nothing I have ever read before or since contains such a mood of pure unearthliness. Wraiths and Dark Lords and devils from fantasy stories seem quaint and old-fashioned, and are more likely to invoke nostalgia rather than awe; aliens from science fiction stories share our laws of nature, and come from our universe. The inhuman presences and monsters of the Night Land, on the other hand, are cloaked in impenetrable mystery.

The chair had four arm rests, because that's what happens when someone has four arms. Leading

perhaps, now he finds more joy in life, having survived

I]f you want to learn kung fu, you must learn to break bricks with your head. If you want to be a fiction writer, you must learn to stare at a blank page with nothing but your name on the top without flinching, without weeping, without getting up to get a beer to fortify your faltering courage.

I am surprised that General Ruin, when she was in zero gee in outer space, did not fall in the direction we call "space-down," travelling in the same direction as the bombs dropped from bomber ships in reel one. We all know objects in outer space are pulled by gravity from the top of the screen to the bottom.

To old times, May they never come again...' 'Old time past and better times to come!

The version of you who forgot his love, a creature more lithotroph than human, failed to pull the trigger, but died on the field of honor. Some say he turned his gun on himself before you shot him." Montrose put his face in his hands. He shot himself in a duel for love of Rania. He remembered having done something like this before.

But men are the thralls and serfs, the gladiators and poppets, the concubines and cattle, the pets and toys of powers they do not see, do not know, and do not recall upon waking. Those few who by mishap recall truly and do know how truly dark the night is, they are called mad and hauled away screaming.

Gil said to Elfine, "I cannot make you an American if that is what you are asking. There is an ordeal all must pass. A trial by paperwork and years of waiting.

una filosofia sembra sempre un fatto a chi ci crede.

None within this Last Redoubt can be alone. Our enemies are ever with us, unsleeping, tireless, horrid.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.

My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years, I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate.

Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few.

Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner's duty to escape.

Vows are powerful things, he said. They set things in motion.

I can't wait to get my memory back. It sounds like I am a really cool person

She said, "Look me right in the eye, and tell me you don't love me, and I'll go." He stared at her. "Miss, I do not love you." "Don't give me that rot! I'm coming with you, and that's final!" "Daphne, you just said that if I said…" "That doesn't count! I said look me right in the eye! You were staring at my nose!

The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt.

Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.

On THE AMBER SPYGLASS: If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.

And therefore a giant hammer of pure stupidity lashed out of the screen and felled me again. I lay mewling, clutching my head with my sweaty hands, whimpering for my Mommy to make it stop. MAKE IT STOP! But it did not stop. It. Did. Not. Stop. -- The Desolation of Tolkien