Vivid Writing Quotes

"We grew together, and now are grown. In her eyes, I see my heart. In her breath, I hear my soul. She is my land. She is my kin. My love."

"Prime. I’ve made a corpse of the best killer’s brother. Dread creeps into me to make a home."

"And violent hearts set harshest flame"

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

"They say a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. They made no mention of the heart."

"We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us."

"Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father."

"Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark."

"and with the sound of a frozen tree branch cracking in winter, I claim the sword arm of Cassius au Bellona."

"We talk about anything but the things we should. Innocent and quiet, like two moths dancing around the same flame."

"When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips the hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met."

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

"He was always our friend,” Roque says. “It was our responsibility to help him try. Even if it was like hugging a flame."

"I long for the cold, quiet nights before love when it was only lust and hunger, where we would kiss in secret, hearts fluttering, like two little birds realizing they might build a nest together after all."

"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."

"His mind is vast. Worlds beyond my own. And perhaps for the first time, I really understand how this man can do what he does. There is no morality to him. No goodness. No evil intent when he killed Eo. He believes he is beyond morality. His aspirations are so grand that he has become inhuman in his desperate desire to preserve humanity. How strange to look at the rigid, cold figure he casts and know all these wild dreams burn inside his head and heart."

"It’s strange watching him leave. Like watching my shadow depart and realizing its destiny may be separate from mine."

"This is more a part of war than trumpets or starships. Quiet, unremembered moments of cruelty."

"I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath."

"We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language."

"He crosses his arms like he’s a kid in a fort looking down at the real world and wondering why it can’t be as magical as he is."

"Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living."

"My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough."

"There is an intensity to his quiet, like a lone cold stone sitting in a still pool of water. A humility to his bearing and expression that I did not expect, and in some way makes me feel as if we stumbled upon an ancient creature in his private garden, one who has seen the shaping of worlds, the sundering of empires. I feel calm, but very, very small as the myth earns flesh. Unlike me, he stood before the Reaper but did not surrender his moon. He gave an arm and a son to protect it."

"As the destruction rains, the Reaper turns from the viewport, his face a death mask of grief and pain, and I feel as if I hear his heart beat across the years, across the space, and know how far he’s come from the man he wanted to be."