Royce's Random Thoughts

Note: I'm not dead, just dealing with a crapload of bad news and stress this week.

Have a couple of quotes from The Curse of Chalion.

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"Every [prince] is handsome. Unless they're completely hideous, in which case their face has 'character'."
-Royesse Iselle on the subject of a potential marriage partner.



“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth."

"Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how they may endure.
-Bergon (said handsome prince) and Cazaril

In which Mr. Terrence Pratchett demonstrates how to create an utterly terrifying character in just two lines of dialog.

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A CROWN?! I NEVER WORE A CROWN!

YOU NEVER WANTED TO RULE.

-Reaper Man

30,000 pages of emails – I could understand it if Stephen King and George R.R. Martin were having an affair!

-Jon Stewart on the Petraeus affair, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 15 November 2012

Courtesy of seawasp. Check out his On My Shelves column for full context.

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C.S. Lewis

"The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick."
-Jo Walton

Morden: What do you want, Vir?
Vir: What do I want? I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?

-Babylon 5

For as long as I can remember people have hated me. They looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear. I live because this poor half-crazed genius, has given me life. He alone held an image of me as something beautiful and then, when it would have been easy enough to stay out of danger, he used his own body as a guinea pig to give me a calmer brain and a somewhat more sophisticated way of expressing myself.
-Young Frankenstein

I am the child, of those unknown,
Here to devour, your flesh and bone.

I, Naziha Zahed

Isaac Asimov had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life
-Harlan Ellison

Vorkosigan looked very thoughtful. "Bothari . . . does not have a good sense of self. No strong center. When I first met him, at his most ill, his personality was close to separating into multiples. If he were better educated, not so damaged, he would have made an ideal spy, a deep-penetration mole. He's a chameleon. A mirror. He becomes whatever is required of him. Not a conscious process, I don't think. Piotr expects a loyal retainer, and Bothari plays the part, deadpan as you please. Vorrutyer wanted a monster, and Bothari became his torturer. And victim. I demanded a good soldier, and he became one for me. You . . ." his voice softened, "you are the only person I know who looks at Bothari and sees a hero. So he becomes one for you. He clings to you because you create him a greater man than he ever dreamed of being."

-Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold