Top 195 Quotes & Sayings by Janet Morris - Page 3

?What doesn't bend must break, when dooms are apportioned and destiny takes the lead. As it will now, and as it must, until this struggle ends.

Shed your mortal skin and let me take you beneath the waves.

I'm going to kill that god of yours, next. Then we'll see what you can do, and what you can't.

Reasons never matter, once Death comes cold and bold and takes the living by the hand. You count up your dead, every one.

When the balance is restored, people get hurt.

Some nights, one wants to tell beloveds everything that's been waiting to be said. Some nights, a man needs flesh and blood and warm breath and a loving heart.

Order is its own reward.

One lot apiece, one chance to undo an error or secure a fate.

Something awful is always going to happen, Arton. It's Sanctuary. You're a Stepson. Awful is a big part of your job.

Die never for a god, Nikodemos who should know better - not your soldiers' god, nor any other.

Look to the souls of Your own soldiers, God, who labor in Thine awful cause.

Here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost the ability to determine greater good, if there was one; his mortal soul he'd given up on long ago. And as for eternal consequence - he was its embodiment.

If cities have souls, Sanctuary's was troubled long before Tempus got here, and will be troubled long after he and his are gone.

Life to you, Riddler, and everlasting glory.

Don't forget, Riddler, how I love thee. Or all we shared together. Or that this sea and all other seas can lead you back to me.

Bandara was not an easy place to return to: it could hide from the common worlds whose periphery it inhabited. But Bandara never had, in all its years, completely disappeared.

Stop grieving. Start giving thanks to me. You live to fight on other days.

Every man heals himself.

If it was true today, it might be untrue tomorrow.

Valor was in Nikodemos, unquestionable, and commitment like trees to stand or night to fall.

"Dreamers and dreaming dead, lots of them from neither here nor there with no chance of getting home again, lost in place and time.

And Tempus thought then that nothing was more worthwhile than what was growing in this whitewashed barracks, where he has come to build a force such as men or gods have never seen - a force worth reckoning with, if you were of a mind. And something was of that mind. And something else opposed it. He should have expected that. Battle in the heavens, battle on the earth.

I'm just a weapon of the god.

Some nights, valor and cold purpose aren't enough.

What would the world be without him, and those like him?

Niko's angular face caught a flicker of firelight and Tempus saw his future there: sharp purpose, discipline, and power in perfect balance; love of man and gods, and mercy transcending all. If war ever wore a more humane face, this one would make it so.

It's in the god's hands.

What is needed is never to be had without price.

In every age he had ever studied, doomsayers abounded. No millennium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.

Men may not believe you, my son. But you must always say the truth, when the truth holds no danger for you or your loved ones.

Deception is a tactic: use it. Do whatever it takes to win.

Loyalty must be forged - to him, to his: stronger than iron, from experience, from risk - it can't be bought, or taught, or promised before the fact. Allegiance must be earned so it will hold, win or lose.

War's balance will prevail.

You count up your dead, every one. Always. Recall them, each and all - every face, every heart.

And what do the Theban hoplites see in this extended rending of the sky, this white-bright glory of Enlil's lightning? The future, but not theirs: paired cavalry fighters; formed ranks of armored death; grim men on their tall horses with lightning limning weapons tailored to the task; men spoiling for a fight if the gods allowed - the Sacred Band of Stepsons, out from shadows and the dark.

Something is going on everywhere, most of which no one understands.

Makes you wonder if the gods are always right.

This is for you. A mage named Randal told me to give it to the Band if you ever came back. 'It surmounts evil,' he told me, 'keeps doom at bay.'

We fouled up. I did. He got hurt. Badly, maybe. And the god...is not helping him today.

Humans create their futures every day of every year; only you can alter your worlds.

No ethos, pursued without thought or mercy, is ethical.

Tempus wanders eternally, bringing death to whomever loves him and being spurned by whomsoever he shall love.

The meaning of life, Nikodemos, is to live life with meaning. The purpose of life is merely to live it, perhaps to give it.

?Niko and his women will be the death of all the Stepsons yet.

There are stranger things here than Thebans know about.

Why is it we are always the targets of the angry Fates? Twice as many men of ours met harm as did theirs, since we've come here.

You're not one to take lightly, to love of for an evening and leave of a dawn.

A wise one determines his own fate.

To the death with honor, shoulder to shoulder, and no one gets closer to a Stepson than his partner.

The Fates are here because of supernal anger, celestial imbalance, and arrogance of men and gods that must be curbed.

Nothing he knew of, enunciated life like death.

But she has found real love, and love can heal and save.

Keep your enemies at a distance, your partners close at hand.

It's all right. Things as they once were will never be again, but it's all right.

It's all the same - no good without evil, no balance...no maat. If we lose one, we lose the other. It's just life, that's all.

Time to unite the Sacred Bands, Thebans and his people: one unit, one heart, one swing through life.

As Seth's apprentice, I've learned wisdom of which you've never dreamed.

Choose life over death, Niko, when a choice can be made that puts no soul in jeopardy.

Men are fools who forget what really matters while time goes by.

?Old enough to kill means old enough to die