1.
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
Tad Williams
2.
Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
Tad Williams
3.
You are only a prisoner when you surrender.
Tad Williams
4.
After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?
Tad Williams
5.
Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important.
It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons.
Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.
Tad Williams
6.
...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.
Tad Williams
7.
Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.
Tad Williams
8.
Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.
Tad Williams
9.
Though talent is wonderful, dance is 80% work and 20% talent.
Tad Williams
10.
Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.
Tad Williams
11.
A well-aimed spear is worth three.
Tad Williams
12.
Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.
Tad Williams
13.
You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)
Tad Williams
14.
Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.
Tad Williams
15.
If the bears don't get you, it's home.
Tad Williams
16.
When your teeth are gone, learn to like mush.
Tad Williams
17.
Every man is the hero of his own song.
Tad Williams
18.
Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.
Tad Williams
19.
As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.
Tad Williams
20.
The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.
Tad Williams
21.
Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.
Tad Williams
22.
You have to go down before you can come out — that’s how these things always work.
Tad Williams
23.
People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?
Tad Williams
24.
I mean, you could lie here day after day, if you wanted to, and think about nothing but waterbugs. Not chase waterbugs, mind you, just think about them. You could spend your whole day, every day, just wondering and pondering about waterbugs, and talking to others about waterbugs . . . and before you realized it, you'd be old. One day you'd realize that you'd never actually seen a waterbug . . . but by then you wouldn't want to, because it would spoil all your beautiful ideas.
Tad Williams
25.
Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age - Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds. No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.
Tad Williams
26.
He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had
Tad Williams
27.
So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.
Tad Williams
28.
Has everyone gone mad?” “Everyone was mad already, my lady,” Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. “It is merely that the times have brought it out in them.
Tad Williams
29.
Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific!
Tad Williams
30.
THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.
Tad Williams
31.
Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?
Tad Williams
32.
Tangaloor, fire-bright Flame-foot, farthest walker Your hunter speaks In need he walks In need, but never in fear.
Tad Williams
33.
Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.
Tad Williams
34.
The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.
Tad Williams
35.
When it falls on your head, then you are knowing it is a rock.
Tad Williams
36.
He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.
Tad Williams
37.
Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.
Tad Williams
38.
Weak dogs become bones for other, stronger dogs.
Tad Williams
39.
She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.
Tad Williams
40.
The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst.
Tad Williams
41.
I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
Tad Williams
42.
If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God... except for the aspirations of fallen angels.
Tad Williams
43.
Honor is the only really good disguise for an occasional act of dishonor.
Tad Williams
44.
We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.
Tad Williams