Gambit Quotes

I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery—some things are too precious to gamble.

Everything's a game. Avery Grambs. The only thing we get to decide in life is if we play to win.

The only person I trust with all that I am and all that could be, Heiress, is you.

It's an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it's predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.

Although social relationships may be crippled by acrimonious minefields, manipulative psychological gambits or mysterious undercurrent power games, a number of social tell-tale flickers might help us in finding a lucid interpretation of hazy circumstances. ("Trompe le pied.")

I don't do vulnerable," Thea retorted. "It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot talk, so I listen very well. I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like being a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words "soccer" and "neighbor" in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele, and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

Grayson told me. “I wanted her to be you.” “Don’t say that,” I whispered. He looked at me one last time. “There are so many things that I will never say.

The world is the board, Heiress. We just have to keep rolling the dice.

What was that?" Belgarath asked, coming back around the corner. "Brill," Silk replied blandly, pulling his Murgo robe back on. "Again?" Belgarath demanded with exasperation. "What was he doing this time?" "Trying to fly, last time I saw him." Silk smirked. The old man looked puzzled. "He wasn't doing it very well," Silk added. Belgarath shrugged. "Maybe it'll come to him in time." "He doesn't really have all that much time." Silk glanced out over the edge. "From far below - terribly far below - there came a faint, muffled crash; then, after several seconds, another. "Does bouncing count?" Silk asked. Belgarath made a wry face. "Not really." "Then I'd say he didn't learn in time." Silk said blithely.

When we come to face the entangled vagaries on the chessboard of our life, let us not shrink from using the queen’s gambit to disentwine predictable hassles or diffuse incendiary plots if we want to take control of our being and make our dreams come true, transparent, and straightforward. (”Life with a sea view”)

She was alone, and she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.

I don’t believe in destiny or fate—I believe in choice. Love wasn’t just a choice—it was dozens, hundreds, thousands of choices. Every day was a choice.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Sometimes you have an idea of a person — about who they are, about what you'd be like together. But sometimes that's all that it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.” He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.

Hit me with all those thinky thoughts,

I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery-some things are too precious to gamble.

Like, even in fiction, friends to lovers? Never my thing. I'm more star-crossed tragedy, supernatural soul mates, enemies to lovers. Epic, you know?

The strongest person is the person who isn’t scared to be alone.

The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.

Everything hurts.” Only Grayson Hawthorne could say that and still sound utterly bulletproof. “It hurts all the time, Avery, but I know the man I was raised to be.

Chess isn't always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful.

What if he hates me?" "No one could possibly hate you, Xander," I told him, my heart twisting. "Avery, people have hated me my whole life." There was something in his tone that made me think that very few people understood what it was like to be Xander Hawthorne. "Not anyone who knows you," I said fiercely. Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?

Hawthornes aren’t supposed to break, his voice whispered in my memory. Especially me.

She had flirted with alcohol for years. Now it was time to consummate the relationship.

What is the human condition, if not Why me?

There is no such thing as fighting dirty, I told Nash, if you win.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. “Do you think it’s okay,” he said, sounding younger than I’d ever heard him, “that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?

All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.

Now, if that’s everything, I have an empire to build and a girl to chase.

I don't want to explain to you what I don't want to explain to you.

My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.

It is foolish to run risk of going mad for vanity's sake.

But sometimes a person’s brain starts cycling. No matter what you do, the same thoughts just keep repeating, over and over. You get stuck in a loop, and when you’re inside that loop, you can’t see past it. You’ll keep coming up with the same possibilities, to no end, because the answers you need—they’re outside the loop. Distractions aren’t just distractions. Sometimes they can break you out of the loop.

Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts.

Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond

But then, war is about taking the future away from people.

Even in the darkest of times, Xander was Xander. "You're going to drop one of those on your foot," I said. "That's okay," Xander responded cheerfully. "I have two feet!

You hated the idea of me.” “But not you. Never you.” “I wanted Eve to be different,” Grayson told me. “I wanted her to be you.” “Don’t say that,” I whispered. He looked at me one last time. “There are so many things that I will never say.

Nash. Grayson. Jameson. Xander.” He said their names one at a time. “You were the clay, and I was the sculptor, and it has been the joy and honor of my life to make you better men than I will ever be. Men who may curse my name but will never forget it.

You're honorable, Avery Kylie Grambs. Once you were with me, you were with me. You love me, scars and all. I know that, Heiress. I do.

I guess that’s what happens,” Jameson said, his eyes never leaving mine as his lips curled upward, “when you take a very risky gamble.

And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man's world. To hell with her; it wouldn't be a man's world when she finished with it.

Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess.

It (proof by contradiction) is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.

As soon as a friendship passed a certain point - some obscure and secret boundary - a woman quite automatically became overwhelmed by a raging compulsion to complicate things.

Aching for them, I wondered who had made Skye so desperate to be the center of someone's world that she couldn't even love her own children, for fear they wouldn't love her back enough.

Someone told me once that fortunes like this one–at a certain point, it's not about the money, because you couldn't spend billions if you tried It's about the power." I looked down. "And I just don't think anyone should have power like that, certainly not me.

So,” Libby said sagely, “chess.” “Chess,” I repeated. “The move—it’s called the Queen’s Gambit. Whoever’s playing white puts that second pawn in a position to be sacrificed, which is why it’s considered a gambit.” “Why would you sacrifice a piece?” Libby asked. I thought about billionaire Tobias Hawthorne, about Toby, about Jameson, Grayson, Xander, and Nash. “To take control of the board,” I said.

A few months ago, she’d gotten a tattoo, a single word inked from wrist bone to wrist bone, just under the heel of her hand. SURVIVOR.

When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.

I have a better idea.” Jameson lowered his lips to mine. My neck arched. More mud on my face, my clothes. “I bet,” he countered, “that you can’t wash all this mud off before I…” “Before you what?” I murmured. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne smiled. “Guess.

They’d been sculpted by Tobias Hawthorne, formed and forged by the billionaire’s hands. They were extraordinary, and for the first time in their lives, they weren’t living under the weight of his expectations.

Steve got that pinched, unhappy look on his face that Tony never knew how to deal with. Most of the time he either threw something more broken than himself in Steve's path and ran, or just offered to buy the Dodgers again. Neither of the gambits worked well, but Tony was out of ideas.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

Most people are idiots

After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess.

I could have done this at eight.

Sometimes you have an idea of a person — about who they are, about what you'd be like together. But sometimes that's all that it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.” He looked at me like the act of soing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.

Of course he was afraid of war. Only fools are not. Anaxantis was no fool. He was fully prepared to fight, but only as a last resort.

The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don't fold.

The consistent and persistent man of average intelligence is more likely to succeed than an erratic and lazy genius.

Ready." Libby looked down at the water balloons she held in each hand–and at her twin tattoos: SURVIVOR on one wrist, and on the other ... TRUST.

There had been a few times over the past year when she felt like this, with her mind not only dizzied but nearly terrified by the endlessness of chess.

My tranquility needs to be refurbished,

He saw dozens of permutations in how things could play out, planned for every eventuality, strategized for each and every possible future.

Bullshitting god would be Max's plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father's opening gambit. He'd point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better character to work with, instead of sending him into battle so poorly equipped.

Life without any wonder left in it is flat and stale.

You made me hungry," I told Jameson. "for everything. I want the world now." I held his gaze in a way that dared him to look away. "And I want it with you.

There are events in life from which we learn our most profound lessons and sometimes those events are the ones of which we are most ashamed.

just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

Benny, I like the way your hair looks.

I don't do vulnerable. It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.

I was born ready!” Xander brandished his shield. He smiled a very Xander Hawthorne smile, then let his bravado falter. “But before we go, group hug?

Let your anger light a fire that the world will never extinguish.

What you know is not always important.

If you had a baby…,” I said. “When I have a baby,” came the deep, heart-shattering reply, “she’ll be my whole world.” “She?” I repeated. Nash settled back into his seat. “I can picture Lib with a little girl.

According to the Shuos," Jedao said, "games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.

But mostly, I can’t hate him, Avery Kylie Grambs, because he brought me you.

I moved on from Emily,” he said. “Gray didn’t. And I know in my soul that if he had, he could have loved you. He would have.

Besh grinned. “Only a fool would choose to justify himself by likening his actions to those of a bigger fool.

Remember that despite the fact that I'm a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn't me.

Even if no one else loves you, you can. Even if no one else ever puts you first, you can.

Some day, Prince Kheldar, you will fall in love," the queen said with a little smirk, "and the twelve kingdoms will stand around and chortle over the fall of so notorious a bachelor.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

Libby moved toward Nash and took his phone from his pocket. There was something intimate about the action—the way he let her, the way she knew he would.

That’s my girl!” Xander bellowed. “Woman,” Max corrected. “That’s my woman! In a completely not possessive and absolutely unpatriarchal kind of way!

Nash, I’ve cued up the Taylor Swift for you.

What are we if we are not words?

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust.

Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such tremendous importance take place that the world is never the same again .... Now's the time to be alive-- to see it happen, to be a part of it. That makes the blood race, and each breath is an adventure.

Why were there no words that spoke positively about being concerned about the self? Why was there only negative connotation in terms like "selfish", "self-interested", "self-centred", "self-obsessed" and so on? Why was it so much better to be without a self: "selfless", "self-sacrificing", "self-effacing", etc?

Better is being my friend and my partner and realizing that you don't get to make decisions for me. Better is the way you make me see myself as a person who's capable of anything. I would jump out of a plane with you, Jameson, snowboard down the side of a volcano with you, bet everything that I have on you - on us, against the world. You don't get to run off and take risks and expect me to stay behind in a gilded cage of your making. That isn't who you are, and it's not what I want.

This was a different Eve. Gone were the layers of self-protection, the vulnerability, the raw emotion—all of it. “You helped Blake abduct Toby, didn’t you?” I said, certainty washing over me like a wave of heat. “I wouldn’t have had to,” Eve replied, her tone smooth and hard, “if Toby had opened up. If he’d just agreed to bring me here. But he wouldn’t.

Dav­el­lon may be a vil­lage, but the Dav­el­lon House can be any­thing you make it. No­bil­ity has to start some­where. It might as well start with you. Let no­body look down on you, for what­ever rea­son, My Lord. Ti­tles are granted or in­her­ited, no­bil­ity isn't. ~Tenaxos I to Landar Parmingh, Baron Davellon

How old were you when you started playing?”, she asked. “Five. I was District Champion at seven. I hope to be a World Champion one day.” “When?” “In three years.” “You'll be sixteen in three years”, she said, “If you win, what will you do afterward?”. He looked confused. “I don't understand”, he replied. “If you're a World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of your life?” He still looked confused. “I don't understand”.

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story , you, upon hearing the words 'soccer' and 'neighbor' in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say, not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

I am a harmless old seller of apples," she said, in a voice more appropriate for the opening of hostilities in a middle-range war. "Pray let me past, dearie." The last word had knives in it. "No-one must enter the castle," said one of the guards. "Orders of the duke." Granny shrugged. The apple-seller gambit had never worked more than once in the entire history of witchcraft, as far as she knew, but it was traditional. "I know you, Champett Poldy," she said. "I recall I laid out your grandad and I brought you into the world." She glanced at the crowds, which had regathered a little way off, and turned back to the guard, whose face was already a mask of terror. She leaned a little closer, and said, "I gave you your first good hiding in this valley of tears and by all the gods if you cross me now I will give you your last." There was a soft metallic noise as the spear fell out of the man's fearful fingers. Granny reached and gave the trembling man a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "But don't worry about it," she added. "Have an apple.

The situation is established not only to provoke defensiveness but to sidetrack the reformer into answering the wrong questions.... In this, the pattern of discourse resembles that of dinnertime conversations about feminism in the early 1970s. Questions of definition often predominate. Whereas feminists were parlaying questions which trivialized feminism such as "Are you one of those bra burners?" vegetarians must define themselves against the trivializations of "Are you one of those health nuts?" or "Are you one of those animal lovers?" While feminists encountered the response that "men need liberation too," vegetarians are greeted by the postulate that "plants have life too." Or to make the issue appear more ridiculous, the position is forwarded this way: "But what of the lettuce and tomato you are eating; they have feelings too!" The attempt to create defensiveness through trivialization is the first conversational gambit which greets threatening reforms. This pre-establishes the perimeters of discourse. One must explain that no bras were burned at the Miss America pageant, or the symbolic nature of the action of that time, or that this question fails to regard with seriousness questions such as equal pay for equal work. Similarly, a vegetarian, thinking that answering these questions will provide enlightenment, may patiently explain that if plants have life, then why not be responsible solely for the plants one eats at the table rather than for the larger quantities of plants consumed by the herbivorous animals before they become meat? In each case a more radical answer could be forwarded: "Men need first to acknowledge how they benefit from male dominance," "Can anyone really argue that the suffering of this lettuce equals that of a sentient cow who must be bled out before being butchered?" But if the feminist or vegetarian responds this way they will be put back on the defensive by the accusation that they are being aggressive. What to a vegetarian or a feminist is of political, personal, existential, and ethical importance, becomes for others only an entertainment during dinnertime.