100 Quotes by Max Gladstone

I’ve gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary.

I like to use the leverage and distance genre offers to try to get into the meat of our fractured modern moment, when the real stuff happening outside our windows is big and strange and world-shaking and weird.

A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors.

You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf – when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.

You see. He thinks of conversations like a chess game, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing.

Words can wound, but they’re bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound.

Craft could transport the soul to wage war on strange planes above the corpses of dead gods, but ultimately there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body.

I have observed friendships as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate behavior, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.