Quotes About Consequences

At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.

The trouble with lies is that they love company. Once you tell a single lie, that lie gets terribly excited and calls all its friends to visit. Soon you find yourself making room for them in every corner, turning down beds and lighting lamps to make them comfortable, feeding them and tidying them and mending them when they start to wear thin.

Because it's my fault, you see. I did it. And you must always clean up your own messes, even when your messes look just like you and curtsy very viciously when what they mean is, I am going to make trouble forever and ever .

One time a Fuckwit brought a snowball into work to prove that the planet getting warmer was just a story to scare little ones and I don't know for sure but I like to think he (or at least all his descendants) got eaten by sharks.

A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.

Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood - do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?

War must always be done out of sight, or it shocks people and they stop immediately.

Can you imagine there being so many people that you could just murder one and nobody would know who did it right away?

Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.

When it was all done and said and shot and ignited and vaporized and swept up and put away and both sincerely and insincerely apologized for, everyone left standing knew that the galaxy could not bear a second go at this sort of thing. Something had to be done. Something mad and real and bright.

What price the Red Wind paid for Hawthorn's postage he never saw. One can only know the weight and heft of the prices one pays onself. The costs borne by others are their own, secret and deep and long.

Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls.

Life is full of 'ifs,' Robert. What is important is what we do with what is.

To live an ethical life is to be held accountable for history.

For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable. And rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.

But how would we repay the kindness of those who received us, if we carried the seeds of the Plague to them? What burden would we bear if, because of us, hundreds die who might have lived?

For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.

Being irretrievably damned had its advantages:

Mother Nature may be forgiving this year, or next year, but eventually she's going to come around and whack you. You've got to be prepared.

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

A great war leaves the country with three armies — an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.