Sm Stirling Quotes

Now let's move on to the subject of how a real man treats his wife. A real man doesn't slap even a ten-dollar hooker around, if he's got any self respect, much less hurt his own woman. Much less ten times over the mother of his kids. A real man busts his ass to feed his family, fights for them if he has to, dies for them if he has to. And he treats his wife with respect every day of his life, treats her like a queen - the queen of the home she makes for their children.

And the first king was a lucky soldier.

You can learn by listening, or by getting whacked between the eyes with a two-by-four. I always found listening easier.

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

Stress" is mostly the result of not being allowed to kill some asshole you really want to slice and dice.

Sacredness grew like a pearl, sometimes around the most unlikely bits of grit.

Sandra was fond of an old Russian saying: When a man causes you a problem, remember: no man, no problem.

Truth is a ladder of many rungs, and that from each we gain a new perspective?″

It is easy to kill. It is equally easy to destroy glass windows. Any fool can do either. Why is it only the wise who perceive that it is wisdom to let live, when even lunatics can sometimes understand that it is better to open a window than to smash the glass?

Being ignorant is truly bliss compared to being misinformed, especially if you’re aware of the depths of your own ignorance. As Mother says, it isn’t what you don’t know that will kill you, it’s what you think you know that just isn’t so.

Manure grew the fodder for the cow that made that ice cream and fertilized the beets that gave us the sugar, my girl," Juniper said sternly. "Earth must be fed or we all go hungry.

There may be a worse form of government than theocracy in the long run, but offhand I can't think of any.

It doesn't stop being magic because you can you explain it, Father.

Be your own judge. But commit no trespass, remembering that where another's liberty begins your own inevitably meets its boundary.

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.

. . . you should always kick a man when he's down. It's much easier then.

Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks.

But then they were males, and therefore idiots about some things.

Against fashion, even tyrants struggle in vain, she thought.

Sure it is that They have many faces. All the shapes the Divine shows us are true; and none are all the Truth.

God is the greatest of artists! How good of Him to give us this world, and the change to imitate Him by bettering it. Wryly: If only we did not mar it, and ourselves, so often!

God is no respecter of either persons or names - Dieu or Gott or Kyrie or Adonai or Wakantanka. He is the Great Spirit whose pity we ask.

We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all,

″He chose to come onto your land uninvited with a weapon in his hand,″ he said. ″When a man does that, he consents to his fate and makes you clean of his blood.″

Mackenzies buried a rapist at a crossroads, with a spear thrust in the soil above; and they buried him living when they could, as a sacrifice to turn aside the anger of the Earth Powers.

He smiled, looking into the flames. "He used to sleep on the foot of my bed, bad breath and gas and all, and I even took him hunting." "It's odd to take a dog hunting?" "Max? Yeah, sort of like taking along a brass band. He saved a lot of deer from death.

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.

... and he kills without fear, or anger, or hate, with regret even, simply because its necessary. That's rare, and it's rare still among the really first-rate. God help the enemy that finally frightens him or makes him mad.

Likes to fight, does he?" Sandra said thoughtfully. "Oh, yeah. He says there are only two reasons to fight." "Which are?" "Joy and death." Her mother's brows went up. "Joy in death?" "No, no... For joy, to stretch yourself with a friend; or death, to kill as quickly as you can. Nothing in between.

It was hard, to be stripped of the cold comforts of her simple atheistic faith in middle-age. The more so as the evidence seemed to lead to the conclusion that all the religions were true, including the ones that flatly contradicted each other.

Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon: A German who's forgotten his grandmother was Welsh.

And doesn’t everything die and return; the grass, the trees, the fields? Why not us?

Testosterone rots the brain . . .

It wasn’t taking the trip well; cats seldom did, being little furry Republicans with an in-built aversion to change.

. . . ‘You can try and maybe fail, or not try and always fail,

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.

He was of the Old Religion, like nearly all Mackenzies, and wouldn't object to a Catholic ceremony - his faith taught that all paths to the Divine were valid. Christians tended to be a little more exclusive.

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

Yes, she loved the Lord and Lady in Their many forms . . . but those forms spanned the universe of space and time that sprang from Them, and They could be as terrible as the fiery death of suns, as inexorable as Time. A mother's kiss on her child's face came from Them, but so also the glaciers that grind continents to dust.

Wholly homelike was the wedge of apple pie with whipped cream, and a piece of yellow cheese beside it, sharp and dry and crumbly, just right to cut the rich sweetness of the pie filling and the buttery taste of the crust.

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.

(Dennis says) "Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?" "Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus...

Clan custom and law held that it was the public declaration of intent and then living together that made a handfasting; the ceremonies simply bore witness to it and asked blessings and luck of the Powers on the new family. He knew Christians thought that the ceremony was the marriage, though.

(Referring to an obsession with Tolkien's Middle Earth): I meet a beautiful American heiress, I like her, she likes me . . . and then she turns out to be a fundamentalist with a more literal interpretation of scripture than I feel comfortable with. Only our bible was written by an Oxford don about sixty years ago.

Fear worked both ways - if you suppressed the physical symptoms, it calmed your mind.

Leading means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people

How have I survived uncorrupted this long, surrounded by oil-tongued flatterers like you,

Children do make life more interesting, he thought.

Oh Powers of Earth and Sky, what is it that you’ve brought back, to run wild once more upon the ridge of the world?

It did a man no harm to get drunk now and then, but only now and then.

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

if wisdom was easy any fool would be able to do it.

Sandra nodded. “Agreed. A…oh, God, let’s not call it a United Nations, shall we? That would doom things from the start.

Because in this life everything, absolutely everything, is either a challenge or a reward,

The knife he held was obsidian, sharp enough to cut a dream.

dropped the idea of writing professionally and focused on earning a living. I’m fairly sure that was the wrong decision.

Who dares, wins,” he muttered to himself. “Or gets royally banged about if things go south.

Grandchildren give most of the joys of parenthood and only a tenth the labor and pain.

The others saw him as he stumbled down the stairs, bleeding from nose and ears and eyes an mouth. The sheathed form of the Sword lay across his palms. He met their eyes, and choked out: "Remember. Remember, all of you." Mathilda's voice was infinitely gentle. "Remember what?" "That I was a man, before I was King. Remember for me, when I forget. His hand closed on the black double-lobed hilt, and the moonfire in the opal glowed. He drew the Sword, thrust it high. And screamed as pain beyond all bearing ripped through him like white fire, turning his body to a thing of ash smoke. He screamed, and knew.

I was father to the land. I saved my people. I was... King. "By... earth," he said, more a movement of the lips than a thing of the throat and air. "By... sky..." Another breath, and it did hurt a little now. The next was harder. The women leaned over him, the mothers of his children. He blinked once more. His own mother, her black braids swinging as she rocked his hurt away. She was singing to him: "Manabozho saw some ducks Hey, hey, heya hey Said 'Come little brothers, sing and dance'; Hey, hey, heya hey--

It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.

I like you, Mike. I just wanted to know about you.” He grinned and finished building the fire. “OK, point taken, and I like you too, Juney. It was an RPG.” “Role-playing game?” she asked, bewildered, and saw him laugh aloud, his head thrown back—for the first time since they met, she realized. “Rocket Propelled Grenade,” he said.

What was it Da said? Órlaith thought grimly. Yes, that it’s a great pity that fighting evil starts with killing evil’s conscripted farmers.

Be as you wish to seem, an ancient had said. It was good advice. Because acting brave and being so are very much the same thing.

Is maith an scáthán súil charad!” Juniper replied ruefully. “A friend’s eye is a good mirror!

These were his followers—Zarallo had placed him in charge, and that made him responsible for their rights.

Conan nodded again, acknowledging a deed worth doing. What were the bonds of kinship for, if not to have someone to stand by you in life and take vengeance if you fell?

Pretzel soup with smoked pork and caramelized onions.

Miles

The story never ends, but our part in the tale does, for a while, and I’m in the mood for some happy-ever-aftering! We earned it, as the Gods themselves know!

″And yet half a beast is the great God Pan To laugh as he sits by the river; Making a legend out of a man. The true Gods weep for the loss and the pain For the reed that will never grow again As a reed, with the reeds, by the river.″

Even God knew mortality and change when He became flesh in this fallen world, and we must remain supple before time’s gales.

We climbed the Sea-End Tower in the lost city of Toronto as the High King and his comrades did on the Quest. It’s still standing, our lake-boat touched there on our way east,

the only

being crazy is a job qualification.

″May you leave without returning and fall without rising, addressed to the lovely darlin′ man himself. The which is perhaps a little too close to a curse for comfort, but sometimes things need to be said.″

Lay on, MacDuff Lay on with the soup, and the Haggis and stuff; For though ’tis said you are our foe What side my bread’s buttered on you bet I know!

His grandmother had said to him once, smiling slightly, that if you compelled people to behave as if they believed something eventually all but the strongest-willed really did start to believe it, because it was easier on their pride than admitting every moment in the privacy of their soul that they were pretending.

He wasn’t afraid a pipe now and then would kill him. As far as he could tell, a lot of the old Americans had been quivering daisies who thought they’d live forever if only they were careful enough, as if life was worth living that way. Some of them had believed eating butter was bad for you, of all things.

like biting down on copper foil.

the Covenstead at the center of the town . . . no, the Saints called it a Meeting House. The center was a big hall lit by clerestory windows around the edge where the bright light of dawn showed. One half was full of pews, the second—oddly—equipped with basketball hoops and a recessed

from that valley near the Tetons, over past the Wind River

I really know the implications, and you don’t. We’re not talking about a better breed of catapults or . . . or D&D hit levels.

pedal cars, so it went quickly. I was at my Order′s new chapter house on our mission farm at Drumheller, and I carried it on snowshoes and skis over the mountain passes and down to Barony Vernon in the Okanogan country. Then by horse and rail to the Columbia and Portland. I came all the way myself rather than handing

They waited. Reiko let the silence and the sounds fill her. Having thought, I have acted, she thought. Let the arrow fly. In

the swift daring strength of his youth and the steady hand of his ripe manhood we have had, but the wisdom of his deep age is taken from us and that we will never have, spilled with the blood he shed for us! Mourn, then, mourn! For he is lost and gone and we will send him to the sky and the earth and the sea.

Peace to the sky Sky to the earth Earth beneath sky Strength in all.

If you have to farm, the Willamette is about the best place in the world to do it.

though. Here, besides books like Langer’s Grow It!, Livingston’s Guide to Edible Plants and Animals, Emery’s Encyclopedia of Country Living and of course Seymour’s Forgotten Arts and Crafts—their

Mounted infantry can’t force each other to fight, because the other side can just trot off. But we can make him fight, because we don’t have to stop and get off our horses to shoot.

A man′s mind is never all of one thing, nor does he know himself or all his reasons beneath the masks he wears. They deceive even the wearer.

It was good to have subordinates who didn't need their t's crossed and the i's dotted.

This plan may be bungled into wreck by fools.

It's easier to be brave than watch another you care for be brave without you.

Not a lad anymore; old flesh doesn’t heal like young. Learn to like it; when you’re hurting, you’re not dead.

of

Luz nodded back with equal gravity, thinking for a moment of the Lion of Chaeronea sitting its long watch over the bones of the Sacred Band of Thebes, where they had stood to meet the charge of Alexander the Great and won the hero’s privilege of a common grave. Stood, and died in their tracks to the last man—to the last pair of erastês and erômenos, lover and beloved, their locked shields facing the Macedonian lances side by side.

Be as you wish to seem, an ancient had said. It was good advice. Because acting brave and being so are very much the same thing.

Come to me, Lord and Lady Heal this spirit, heal this soul Come to me, Lord and Lady Mind and body shall be whole! Beast of the burning sunlight Sear this wound that pain may cease Mistress of the silver moonlight Hold us fast and bring us peace— Come to me, Lord and Lady Mind and body shall be whole!

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