Top 500 Brandon Sanderson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

— Brandon Sanderson

152. “Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats – after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator.”

— Brandon Sanderson

153. “To be human is to seek beauty, Shallan. Do not despair, do not end the hunt because thorns grow in your way.”

— Brandon Sanderson

154. “Llarimar had told him to do his best. That sounded like an awful lot of work. Unfortunately, doing nothing was beginning to seem like even MORE work.”

— Brandon Sanderson

155. “Don’t complain. Change.”

— Brandon Sanderson

156. “But things can’t stay the same – and that’s well, for when nothing changes in your life, it’s as good as being dead.”

— Brandon Sanderson

157. “People are elastic, Wax thought. We can keep reshaping ourselves. And if we’re not quite the same as before, well, that’s good. It means we can grow.”

— Brandon Sanderson

158. “A thing of nature. For every Push, there is a Pull. A consequence.”

— Brandon Sanderson

159. “We lift the bridge together, Teft,” Kaladin said. “And we carry it.”

— Brandon Sanderson

160. “Two blind men waited at the end of an era, contemplating beauty. They sat atop the world’s highest cliff, overlooking the land and seeing nothing.”

— Brandon Sanderson

161. “For the greater good.” “That has been the excuse of tyrants throughout all time.”

— Brandon Sanderson

162. “So I can but repeat what has been done before?’ “ ‘In some things, yes. You will love. You will hurt. You will dream. And you will die. Each man’s past is your future.’ “ ‘Then what is the point?’ I asked. ‘If all has been seen and done?’ “ ‘The question,’ she replied, ’is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”

— Brandon Sanderson

163. “Love wasn’t about being right or wrong, but about standing up and helping when your partner’s back was bowed.”

— Brandon Sanderson

164. “Life breaks us, Teft. Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”

— Brandon Sanderson

165. “Somehow, we’ll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”

— Brandon Sanderson

166. “Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before pancakes -Lopen.”

— Brandon Sanderson

167. “I strive for nothing if not consistency.”

— Brandon Sanderson

168. “Can you feel it? Something just changed. I believe that’s the sound the world makes when it pisses itself.”

— Brandon Sanderson

169. “People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real. If that’s the case, what does it matter whether people in them actually lived?”

— Brandon Sanderson

170. “What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.” “What does the story mean, then?” “It means what you want it to mean,” Hoid said. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.”

— Brandon Sanderson

171. “I am mountains that crush. I am waves that crash. I am storms that shatter. I am the end.”

— Brandon Sanderson

172. “My dear, did you just try to prove the existence of God through the use of your cleavage?”

— Brandon Sanderson

173. “A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.”

— Brandon Sanderson

174. “Navani Kholin was not some timid, perfect ideal. She was a sour storm of a woman, set in her ways, stubborn as a boulder rolling down a mountain, and increasingly impatient with things she considered foolish. He loved her the most for that.”

— Brandon Sanderson

175. “The most important word a man can say are, “I will do better.”

— Brandon Sanderson

176. “If the journey itself is indeed the most important piece, rather than the destination itself, then I traveled not to avoid duty – but to seek it.”

— Brandon Sanderson

177. “Does one deserve to have evil done to her by consequence of putting herself where evil can reach her?”

— Brandon Sanderson

178. “The right belief is like a good cloak, I think. If it fits you well, it keeps you warm and safe. The wrong fit however, can suffocate.”

— Brandon Sanderson

179. “The difference between good and evil men is not found in the acts they are willing to commit – but merely in what name they are willing to commit them in.”

— Brandon Sanderson

180. “You’ve managed – in our short three years together – to kill not only my god, but my father, my brother, and my fiance. That’s kind of like a homicidal hat trick. It’s a strange foundation for a relationship, wouldn’t you say?”

— Brandon Sanderson

181. “He hadn’t changed in one giant leap, but across a million little steps.”

— Brandon Sanderson

182. “As long as you keep trying, there’s a chance. When you give up? That’s when the dream dies.”

— Brandon Sanderson

183. “I understood in a moment of stillness,′ Litima read. ‘Those candle flames were like the lives of men. So fragile. So deadly. Left alone, they lit and warmed. Let run rampant, they would destroy the very things they were meant to illuminate.”

— Brandon Sanderson

184. “Everything’s going to change, Sazed, and I can’t stop it.” Sazed smiled fondly. “Then, Mistress,” he said quietly, “simply enjoy what you have. The future will surprise you, I think.”

— Brandon Sanderson

185. “Your grasp of the language is startling,” Wax said, “considering how you so frequently brutalize it.” “Ain’t nobody what knows the cow better than the butcher, Wax.”

— Brandon Sanderson

186. “He’d once believed he had been four men in his life, but he now saw he’d grossly underestimated. He hadn’t lived as two, or four, or six men – he had lived as thousands, for each day he became someone slightly different. He hadn’t changed in one giant leap, but across a million little steps.”

— Brandon Sanderson

187. “The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.”

— Brandon Sanderson

188. “The life of a person is more than the chaos of its passing.”

— Brandon Sanderson

189. “I’m not odd! I’m beautiful and articulate.”

— Brandon Sanderson

190. “I am but a man, Dalinar, so much as I wish it were not true at times. I am no Radiant. And while I am your friend, please understand that our goals do not completely align. You must not trust yourself with me. If I have to watch this world crumble and burn to get what I want, I will do so. With tears, yes, but I would let it happen.”

— Brandon Sanderson

191. “I consider myself to be a man of principle. But, what man does not? Even the cutthroat, I have noticed, considers his actions “moral” after a fashion.”

— Brandon Sanderson

192. “Love must be allowed to flow both ways – if it is not, then it is not truly love, I think.”

— Brandon Sanderson

193. “Here, in Alethkar, men often spoke of the legends – of mankind’s hard-won victory over the Voidbringers. But when weapons created to fight nightmares were turned against common soldiers, the lives of men became cheap things indeed.”

— Brandon Sanderson

194. “Hmmmm Light makes shadow. Truth makes lies. Hmmmm.”

— Brandon Sanderson

195. “A hero does not choose her trials. She steps into the darkness, then she faces what comes next.”

— Brandon Sanderson

196. “Sometimes, the answers we need don’t match the questions we’re asking.” He looked up at me. “And sometimes, the coward makes fools of wiser men.”

— Brandon Sanderson

197. “Everything costs money,” Ham said. “But, what is money? A physical representation of the abstract concept of effort.”

— Brandon Sanderson

198. “But still, my ‘freedom’ is that of a leaf. Dropped from the tree, I just blow on the wind and pretend I’m in charge of my destiny.”

— Brandon Sanderson

199. “Harmony protect us from small-minded men with too much power.”

— Brandon Sanderson

200. “Oh, but I’m a scholar. I enjoy things with curious properties, and stupidity is most interesting. The more you study it, the further it flees – and yet the more of it you obtain, the less you understand about it!”

— Brandon Sanderson