Top 90 Christopher Ruocchio Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Imitate the action of the stone. Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

52. “If I have strained you, reader, by my repeated insistence that every action matters, that every moment of every life is the moment, the axis about which all things turn, understand that I say these things because they are true. Every step, every turn, every refusal to step. Everything matters.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

53. “Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

54. “Fear is the death of reason... and reason the death of fear.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

55. “And it is in the nature of stories that times present and past are present in time future, and the future present in the past.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

56. “I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment. If only once.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

57. “So love is not merely an emotion, but a vow made one to another. A vow renewed in each moment, until it hardly needs making at all. Or until it is not made, and death or deed does them part.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

58. “The Golden Age ended because men forgot philosophy in their pursuit of knowledge. They traded a love of wisdom for progress, and it destroyed them.” In a small voice, he added, “The ancient Christians were right to name pride the greatest of man’s sins.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

59. “I would have gone with you to the end, Had,” he said. “The very end.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

60. “Your friends loved you, as I do – as your Valka does. That is why they saved you. And that love, I told you, is a mighty thing!”

— Christopher Ruocchio

61. “A wise man once told me that flesh was the cheapest resource in the human universe and that life spends more easily than gold. I laughed when I heard that and denied him. I was a fool to do so. How little I knew. The arch that led in.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

62. “Fear is death to reason.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

63. “Ignoring a thing is not ignorance, and he who holds his silence is an accomplice every time.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

64. “We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

65. “The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

66. “We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

67. “But despair is the deepest sin, and the final failure.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

68. “Because we are not good.” It took me a moment to realize that it had been I who’d answered. Both my master and student looked at me. “If we were good men, we’d not need all this reflection.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

69. “Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

70. “I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

71. “Women are ever the judges of men, our jury and, though their hands seldom grasp the knife, our executioners.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

72. “Sometimes we say things and do not understand them. In doing so, like Dante, we step off the path and enter into a dark and dangerous new world. There, our lies and wrong turnings swallow us like the sands of the desert. The world objects, or other people do, and we are left desolate and alone. But one need not know Truth to speak it. Truth is, and may be found as readily as disaster and by the same process. One need only put one’s finger on it, or one’s foot in it.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

73. “The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will – to the human observer – always defeat the photograph.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

74. “We are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

75. “We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

76. “Wars aren’t won with soldiers, sir. Not unless you’re willing to kill every single enemy in the galaxy. Wars are fought with soldiers, but they’re won with words.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

77. “Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

78. “Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

79. “Evil occurs because we are insufficient to challenge it. Too weak to stop it at the gates, too blind to see it bubbling within. Were we all angels in our virtue and heroes in our capacity, we might hold all chaos at bay, might stop even the unkindling of the stars. Yet we are but men.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

80. “I found rain in that cloudless sky.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

81. “Beauty cannot stay, nor endure – indeed, that a thing is and is gone next is part of what makes a thing beautiful. The preciousness of any beautiful thing – any good thing – lies in its scarcity. And because all things are scarce when measured against eternity and infinity, all things are beautiful – if seen at the right angle, if captured in the right light.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

82. “The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

83. “But to know a thing and to see it, to experience it, are as different as the moon and the finger pointing to it. Knowledge is not truth, only the apprehension of it. Experience is something else entirely.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

84. “But in most places in the galaxy, nothing is happening. The nature of things is peaceful, and that is a mighty thing.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

85. “I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

86. “We do not get to choose our circumstances or our trials. We can only choose how to respond to them.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

87. “We believe war is waged by heroes and brave men, and it is so. But war is waged as much – and more – by those not brave at all. I am not Pallino, I am not sure I ever was. No Son of Fortitude, me. Only an old man too afraid and too tired to run.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

88. “One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

89. “There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

90. “The dead become ever closer companions as we grow old ourselves and nearer eternity. And afterlife or no, they live on in us. Perhaps that is why it seems we have ghosts. Because we carry them in ourselves.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

91. “We are beasts of burden, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled.”

— Christopher Ruocchio