Quotes from S.M. Stirling

I like you, Mike. I just wanted to know about you." He grinned and finished building the fire. "OK, point taken, and I like you too, Juney. It was an RPG." "Role-playing game?" she asked, bewildered, and saw him laugh aloud, his head thrown back—for the first time since they met, she realized. "Rocket Propelled Grenade," he said.

Being ignorant is truly bliss compared to being misinformed, especially if you're aware of the depths of your own ignorance.

It did a man no harm to get drunk now and then, but only now and then.

How have I survived uncorrupted this long, surrounded by oil-tongued flatterers like you

Fear worked both ways - if you suppressed the physical symptoms, it calmed your mind.

dropped the idea of writing professionally and focused on earning a living. I'm fairly sure that was the wrong decision.

Leading means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people

Because in this life everything, absolutely everything, is either a challenge or a reward

Who dares, wins," he muttered to himself. "Or gets royally banged about if things go south.

Grandchildren give most of the joys of parenthood and only a tenth the labor and pain.

The knife he held was obsidian, sharp enough to cut a dream.

It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.

Children do make life more interesting, he thought.

if wisdom was easy any fool would be able to do it.

I really know the implications, and you don't. We're not talking about a better breed of catapults or . . . or D&D hit levels.

A man?s mind is never all of one thing, nor does he know himself or all his reasons beneath the masks he wears. They deceive even the wearer.

If you have to farm, the Willamette is about the best place in the world to do it.

the Covenstead at the center of the town . . . no, the Saints called it a Meeting House. The center was a big hall lit by clerestory windows around the edge where the bright light of dawn showed. One half was full of pews, the second—oddly—equipped with basketball hoops and a recessed

We climbed the Sea-End Tower in the lost city of Toronto as the High King and his comrades did on the Quest. It's still standing, our lake-boat touched there on our way east

Be as you wish to seem, an ancient had said. It was good advice. Because acting brave and being so are very much the same thing.

And yet half a beast is the great God Pan To laugh as he sits by the river; Making a legend out of a man. The true Gods weep for the loss and the pain For the reed that will never grow again As a reed, with the reeds, by the river.?

from that valley near the Tetons, over past the Wind River

May you leave without returning and fall without rising, addressed to the lovely darlin? man himself. The which is perhaps a little too close to a curse for comfort, but sometimes things need to be said.?

They waited. Reiko let the silence and the sounds fill her. Having thought, I have acted, she thought. Let the arrow fly. In