166 Quotes by Robert Jackson Bennett

Yet I now ask of you—are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?

She needed money. She always needed money. Money to bribe someone, money to buy tools to get more money, money to get a safe place to store her damned money. Life was cheap, and cash, as ever, remained dauntingly expensive.

Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.

Change is a slow flower to bloom. Most of us will not see its full radiance. We plant it not for ourselves, but for future generations.But it is worth tending to. Oh, it is so terribly worth tending to.

People, though, and living things ... their sense of self is ... complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don't think of themselves as just as bag of flesh and blood and bones, even if that's what they basically are. They think of themselves as soldiers, as kings, as wives and husbands and children ... People can convince themselves to be anything.

To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.

He does his best to stumble through an explanation, but he suddenly feels like he knows very little. Perhaps he forgot it all, or perhaps he never really understood it to begin with.

...there is no better time to examine and understand one’s selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.

What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back, and see it was full of treasures.