33 Quotes by S.M. Stirling

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

Like its elder sibling love, friendship was a set of obligations willingly assumed, truth and trust among them, not just a pleasure or a feeling. At least it was if you were to be a friend worth having.

Strange, isn’t it, that it’s always more difficult to talk people out of killing each other than into it?

Black soil flew up in divots; the horses’ heads pounded up and down like pistons, and he felt a sensation of rushing speed no machine could quite match as the great muscles flexed and bunched between his legs. Havel.

Good to have powerful friends. Even better to be a powerful friend, neh?

Because those events are so real that they cast their shadow forward and backwards through all time, whenever men think of these matters at all. Even if they are mired in ignorace, they will see... fragments of the Truth, as men imprisoned in a cave see shadows cast by the sun. Likewise, all men derive their moral intuitions from God; how not? There is no other source, just as there is no other way to make a wheel than to make it round.

Being ignorant is truly bliss compared to being misinformed, especially if you’re aware of the depths of your own ignorance.

To take life was to understand your own death – that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.

Grief is the tribute we pay the dead,” she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. “But they don’t ask more than we can afford to give. They’ve never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they’re part of our story, and we of theirs.