S. M. Stirling Quotes

Stephen Michael Stirling

S. M. Stirling is a Canadian-American science fiction and fantasy author who was born in France. Stirling is well known for his Draka series of alternate history novels and his later time travel/alternate history Nantucket series and Emberverse series. (S. M. Stirling Quotes)

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“Against fashion, even tyrants struggle in vain, she thought.”
S. M. Stirling
A Meeting at Corvallis

“Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon: A German who’s forgotten his grandmother was Welsh.”
S. M. Stirling
The Tears of the Sun

“And doesn’t everything die and return; the grass, the trees, the fields? Why not us?”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Given Sacrifice

“Be your own judge. But commit no trespass, remembering that where another’s liberty begins your own inevitably meets its boundary.”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“Because in this life everything, absolutely everything, is either a challenge or a reward.”
S. M. Stirling
A Meeting at Corvallis

“Being crazy is a job qualification.”
S. M. Stirling
The Given Sacrifice

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Given Sacrifice

“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”
S. M. Stirling
Dies the Fire

“But then they were males, and therefore idiots about some things.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“Children do make life more interesting, he thought.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The High King of Montival

“Dropped the idea of writing professionally and focused on earning a living. I’m fairly sure that was the wrong decision.”
S. M. Stirling
The Change

“Even God knew mortality and change when He became flesh in this fallen world, and we must remain supple before time’s gales.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“Every reality that we can make begins with a dream.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Fear worked both ways – if you suppressed the physical symptoms, it calmed your mind.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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!”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“Good to have powerful friends. Even better to be a powerful friend, neh?”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Grandchildren give most of the joys of parenthood and only a tenth the labor and pain.”
S. M. Stirling
Lord of Mountains

“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.” (S. M. Stirling Quotes)
S. M. Stirling
The Protector’s War

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The High King of Montival

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The High King of Montival

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
Prince of Outcasts

“How have I survived uncorrupted this long, surrounded by oil-tongued flatterers like you.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sky-Blue Wolves

“If wisdom was easy any fool would be able to do it.”
S. M. Stirling
The Desert and the Blade

“It did a man no harm to get drunk now and then, but only now and then.”
S. M. Stirling
The Desert and the Blade

“It doesn’t stop being magic because you can you explain it, Father.”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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?”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
Dies the Fire

“It was good to have subordinates who didn’t need their t’s crossed and the i’s dotted.”
S. M. Stirling
The Desert and the Blade

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Tears of the Sun

“It wasn’t taking the trip well; cats seldom did, being little furry Republicans with an in-built aversion to change.”
S. M. Stirling
Dies the Fire

“Leading means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Desert and the Blade

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
Theater of Spies

“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.” (S. M. Stirling Quotes)
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Protector’s War

“May you leave without returning and fall without rising, addressed to the lovely darlin′ man himself. Which is perhaps a little too close to a curse for comfort, but sometimes things need to be said.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“Necessity had no respect for law. Even custom must bow to it at times.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Not a lad anymore; old flesh doesn’t heal like young. Learn to like it; when you’re hurting, you’re not dead.”
S. M. Stirling
The Protector’s War

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
Dies the Fire

“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?”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“People change when they get older. They get more… cautious. They’ve been hit harder and more often. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid or timid.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Raptors like these falcons were solitary by nature; they didn’t even like each other except in the mating season, much less humans. All you could teach them was that doing what humans wanted would get them more of what they wanted, which was to kill, eat, mate and sleep.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Remember that even if you intend to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“Sacredness grew like a pearl, sometimes around the most unlikely bits of grit.”
S. M. Stirling
Lord of Mountains

“Sandra was fond of an old Russian saying: When a man causes you a problem, remember: no man, no problem.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“Strange, isn’t it, that it’s always more difficult to talk people out of killing each other than into it?”
S. M. Stirling
A Meeting at Corvallis

“Stress” is mostly the result of not being allowed to kill some asshole you really want to slice and dice.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“Sure it is that they have many faces. All the shapes the Divine shows us are true; and none are all the Truth.”
S. M. Stirling
The High King of Montival

“Testosterone rots the brain…”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“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!”
S. M. Stirling
A Meeting at Corvallis

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess

“There may be a worse form of government than theocracy in the long run, but offhand I can’t think of any.”
S. M. Stirling
A Meeting at Corvallis

“Truth is a ladder of many rungs, and that from each we gain a new perspective?”
S. M. Stirling
The Sword of the Lady

“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.” (S. M. Stirling Quotes)
S. M. Stirling
The Desert and the Blade

“We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all.”
S. M. Stirling
Against the Tide of Years

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sky-Blue Wolves

“Who dares, wins,” he muttered to himself. “Or gets royally banged about if things go south.”
S. M. Stirling
The Protector’s War

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Sunrise Lands

“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.”
S. M. Stirling
The Scourge of God

“You can learn by listening, or by getting whacked between the eyes with a two-by-four. I always found listening easier.”
S. M. Stirling
The Protector’s War

“You can’t make a falcon love you, but you can convince its little bird brain that sitting on your glove means a full croup.” “Unless it’s a Harris Hawk.”
S. M. Stirling
The Golden Princess