Stephen Donaldson

Quotes

1. Do not hurt where holding is enough;

   do not wound where hurting is enough;

   do not maim where wounding is enough;

   and kill not where maiming is enough;

   the greatest warrior is he who does not need to kill.

   p. 154

2. 

   He no longer accused himself; he knew then that no one could be blamed for being inadequate in the face of such unanswerable malevolence. Destruction was easier than preservation, and when destruction had risen high enough, mere men and women could not be condemned if they failed to throw back the tide.

   p. 229

3. 

   No one person has the right to withhold knowledge from another. No one is wise enough.

   p. 334

4. 

   The bluff stone of the tower, with Revelstone rising behind it like the prow of a great ship, answered his gaze in granite permanence as if it were a prophecy by the old Giants—a cryptic perception that victory and defeat were human terms which had no meaning in the language of mountains.

   p. 344

5. 

   Retribution—ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all sweet dark dreams.

   p. 392

6. 

   The answer to death was to make use of it rather than fall victim to it—master it by making it serve his goals, beliefs. This was not a good answer. But it was the only answer he had.

   p. 468

7. 

   Yet this withholding of knowledge ran against every grain of his character. He believed intensely that the refusal to share knowledge demeaned both the denier and the denied.

   p. 30

8. 

   It was gray cold and dead from horizon to horizon under the gray dead clouds—not the soft comfortable gray of twilit illusions, of unstark colors blurring like consolation or complacency into each other, but rather the gray of disconsolation and dismay, paradoxically dull and raw, numb and poignant, a gray like the ashen remains of color and sap and blood and bone. Gray wind drove gray cold over the gray frozen hills; gray snow gathered in this drifts under the lees of the gray terrain; gray ice underscored the black, brittle, leafless branches of the trees barely visible in the distance on his left, and stifled the gray, miserable current of the river almost out of sight on his right; gray numbness clutched at his flesh and soul.

   p. 270

9. 

   If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather hear something that makes sense.

   p. 425

10. 

    “Then why do you delay? Why do you fear?”

    Because I am mortal, weak. The way is only clear—not sure. In my time, I have been a seer and oracle. Now I—I desire a sign. I require to see.”

    p. 342

11. 

    The task was impossible, and mortal human beings accomplished nothing but their own destruction when they attempted the impossible.

    p. 297

12. 

    “Are you wise, Unbeliever?”

    “Who knows? If I am—wisdom is overrated.”

    p. 394