“Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.
But the truth was he’d been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped.”

Source: Finch (2009), p. 20

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jeff VanderMeer24

American writer 1968

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Once he had been so formidable that he was surrounded by enemies. Now even his enemies has lost interest in him. What clearer sign of failure could you find than that?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 1 “Nueva Barcelona” (p. 19).

“For he [David] confesses that prosperity had so stupefied and benumbed his senses that he disregarded the grace of God on which he should have depended, relied on himself instead, and imagined that he could not fall.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 50.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

“He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination.”

Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) French poet

“No one cared enough to criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not be this — or that — or the other; always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it, and he found that he had very little to say at best.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He had a distinct problem imagining minds working differently from his own.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 12 (p. 314)

“Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”

Gene Wolfe book The Urth of the New Sun

Source: The Urth of the New Sun

“"Why do you fight?"… He kept his wife, his kid, from dying. That was nothing. Less than nothing. If he had had money, if he could have left it to them, he would have been free to go and get killed. As if the universe had not treated him all his life with kicks in the belly, it now despoiled him of the only dignity he could ever possess — his death.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

La condition humaine [Man's Fate] (1933)

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