Top 30 Brian Staveley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Leadership isn’t just about giving orders. A fool can give orders. A leader listens. He changes his mind. He acknowledges mistakes.”

— Brian Staveley

2. “Those who wait for certitude before they act almost always wait too long.”

— Brian Staveley

3. “Pain is suffering because we want to be free of it, and pleasure is suffering because we fear to lose it. Fools search for freedom, but there is no freedom. There is only the embrace.”

— Brian Staveley

4. “Life is an unwinnable fight, Gwenna Sharpe. If ends are all that matter, then we are all fools and failures.”

— Brian Staveley

5. “I’m doubly sorry for your loss,” the old monk began after a time. “First, because every son should have a chance to know his father, not as a child knows his protector, but as a man knows another man.”

— Brian Staveley

6. “Sometimes you need to break a thing,” the Flea said finally, “in order to see what’s inside it.”

— Brian Staveley

7. “The mind was a clay pot set out in the rain. A monk could empty it daily and still the old hopes and worries, the body’s meager strengths and perennial pains pattered against the bottom, trickled down the sides, filling it once more.”

— Brian Staveley

8. “Like waves, men and women exist only in motion, in change. Put them on the page, and you have already failed. And.”

— Brian Staveley

9. “It is a meager freedom that leaves no scars.”

— Brian Staveley

10. “I’m losing the game, which means I have three choices: cede, fight back... ”... Kaden smiled, “Or break the board.”

— Brian Staveley

11. “Live now. The future is a dream. Triste.”

— Brian Staveley

12. “The fighters who frighten you are not the fighters to fear. The man you barely notice will be the one to bury a blade in your back.”

— Brian Staveley

13. “Sometimes, when the monsters come, you need a dark, monstrous thing to pit against them.”

— Brian Staveley

14. “What I observe is that the world is ruled by men – good men and bad, desperate men and those with principles.”

— Brian Staveley

15. “A roar erupted in his throat, a cry that had been surging up through all the fabric of his flesh since Ha Lin died, rising and growing until it seemed too large for the body that contained it, as though that body had dissolved beneath the pain and the rage, leaving behind a man that was not a man at all, but a scream in the shape of a man, a sob of fury dying to shake free its last mortal bond.”

— Brian Staveley

16. “The mind is a flame. Blow it out, or it will blind you.”

— Brian Staveley

17. “Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little – a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep – to unmake a man or woman. It’s amazing, given everything’s fragility, that we don’t live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.”

— Brian Staveley

18. “The idea... seemed about as likely as a shark strolling out of the sea on its fins to ask for a bowl of soup.”

— Brian Staveley

19. “Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both.”

— Brian Staveley

20. “Easier to recall a loosed falcon than a spoken word.”

— Brian Staveley

21. “The coin you’re so eager to give away was held by other hands before yours. For you to give it so freely, you had to seize it first.”

— Brian Staveley

22. “Oh for ‘Shael’s sweet sake, girl, you think you can rule an empire without lying? You think your father didn’t lie? Or his father? Or any of your goldy-eyed great-great-founders of Annur? It’s built into the job. Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.”

— Brian Staveley

23. “When you know nothing about a creature,” the monk ground out, his voice as hard as a rock slide, “expect it has come to kill you.”

— Brian Staveley

24. “Your words are boxes built too small to hold the truth.”

— Brian Staveley

25. “Any fool can see what’s there. You need to see what is not there.”

— Brian Staveley

26. “The more you try to see, the less you will notice.”

— Brian Staveley

27. “The present is the present. Tomorrow will still be ’now.”

— Brian Staveley

28. “Power appeared to be something that a ruler had, that she held, that she had taken from the people. The appearance was false. Power was something people gave, gave willingly, even if they didn’t know it, even if they resented it.”

— Brian Staveley

29. “It’s built into the job. Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.” Adare.”

— Brian Staveley

30. “You had to admire her, and you had to do it fast, because she was about to get all kinds of killed.”

— Brian Staveley

31. “Often there is no good path. That does not mean we should not walk.”

— Brian Staveley

32. “Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.”

— Brian Staveley

33. “Never speak to a crowd. Her father’s words, measured and steady. Especially not a crowd of thousands. Always speak to a single person.”

— Brian Staveley

34. “There was something about being safe again, about being finally and undeniably alive after living so close to death, that made soldiers, good soldiers, soldiers who held it together for days or weeks under the most brutal circumstances, dance like madmen, collapse sobbing, or drink themselves nearly to oblivion.”

— Brian Staveley