Badassery Quotes

"I was forged in the bowels of this hard world. Sharpened by hate. Strengthened by love."

"I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war."

"Ares once told me that it is the hottest fire that forms the sternest steel. Keep pushing the boy."

"If I am a good man, then why do I want to do bad things?"

"Well, I do believe I am the lightning,” Cassius declares. “And you, my brooding friend, are the thunder."

"I am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains."

"He is as he always told me to be—a stone amid the waves; wet, yet unimpressed by all that swirls about him."

"Mortals who plan die a thousand times. We who obey die but once."

"My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear, no defeat, only victory. Your cowardice seeps from you. Your rage burns bright. Rise, warrior of Gold, and take with you your Color’s might."

"Let fall the Rain."

"To my left and right, the falling soldiers look like raging lightning bugs jerked out of some Carver’s fantasy. I admire one to my left, the bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment—one I know I shall never forget—so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again."

"Some men have threads of life so strong that they fray and snap those around them. Enough friends have paid for my war. This one’s on me."

"This is always how the story would end,” he says to me. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your silence."

"He wants pity. My pity was lost in the darkness."

"Death chewed on me a bit. Then spat my bloody ass back out. Said there was killing that needed doin’ and some wild blood of mine that needed savin’"

"I released your Carving to every mine. To every holoSite. To every millimeter of this bloodydamn Society. The Golds thought they could kill you off. That they could beat you and make your death mean nothing. I’ll be damned if I’d let that happen.” He thumps his hand on a table. “Damned if I’d let you disappear facelessly into the machine like my mother. There’s not a Red on Mars that doesn’t know your name, Reap. Not a single person in the digital world who doesn’t know that a Red rose to become a prince of the Golds, to conquer Mars. I made you a myth. And now that you’re back from the dead, you’re not just a martyr. You’re the bloodydamn messiah the Reds have been waiting for their entire lives."

"Shit escalates"

"Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io’s sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising."

"Take my hand in kinship for the sake of your people and the sake of Gold. Or I will use it to build an age of peace upon the ashes of your house."

"I pace my bridge like a caged wolf, his meal just beyond the bars. The kindness of me hidden again behind the Reaper’s savage face."

"I have seen the heavens, I have seen the hells, and I know now that our future is war,"

"Bend. Or break."

"Hell hath no fury like a woman packing a railgun."

"Well, here I am, you deviant bitch. Here I bloody am. The motherfucking consequence."

"The old rage in colder ways, for they alone decide how to spend the young."