Matthew Stover

When the gods would punish us, they answer our prayers.

"I guess heroes feel like they've accomplished something." "And you haven't? Several thousand slaves might disagree."

The feeling he'd had, that he was about to get himself killed, swelled into an overwhelming premonition of doom. Ganner's knees went weak, and a very large part of him wanted to bolt down the corridor and get away-but though he hadn't been much of a hero, the one virtue he'd never had to fake was courage.

Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other.

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them--but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey."

This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating.

"Reasons are for peasants."

"All true stories end in death."

"We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer."

His destiny had betrayed him, had made him a destroyer on a scale that humbled even Caine. Destiny, he understood with bitter certainty, could not be trusted.

Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be.