Top 120 David Eddings Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Lying is an art. A good lie shouldn’t be embellished so much.”

— David Eddings

52. “Listen to the way people talk. If your characters sound real the rest is easy.”

— David Eddings

53. “Events are like horses. Sometimes they run away. After they’ve run for a while, though, they’ll start to walk again. Then there’ll be a time to put everything together.”

— David Eddings

54. “Then you’ve learned something today. No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.”

— David Eddings

55. “It’s all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?”

— David Eddings

56. “Some day, Prince Kheldar, you will fall in love,” the queen said with a little smirk, “and the twelve kingdoms will stand around and chortle over the fall of so notorious a bachelor.”

— David Eddings

57. “Everyone’s lonely, dear,” she explained, drawing him close to her. “We touch other people only briefly, then we’re alone again. You’ll get used to it in time.”

— David Eddings

58. “I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we’re in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.”

— David Eddings

59. “All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up.”

— David Eddings

60. “All I knew was that I would die if he sent me away. He shrugged. You can cut a man’s heart out with a shrug, did you know that?”

— David Eddings

61. “Vanity’s ridiculous, be we all fall prey to it from time to time.”

— David Eddings

62. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to judge things by appearances, Ce’Nedra,” she said, “and it’s usually wrong.”

— David Eddings

63. “Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it.”

— David Eddings

64. “That’s the nature of a fat man, Ce’Nedra.” He sighed. “The last meal is history. It’s the next one that’s important.”

— David Eddings

65. “The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.”

— David Eddings

66. “The dullest man in the world is charming beyond belief when he’s pouring gold coins from one hand to the other.”

— David Eddings

67. “One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven’t treated very well; it’s much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn’t nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.”

— David Eddings

68. “I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it’s mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.”

— David Eddings

69. “We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that’s taken a very long time.”

— David Eddings

70. “Just because I love her, it doesn’t mean that I love you less.”

— David Eddings

71. “Watch out for snakes,’ Durnik called after him.”

— David Eddings

72. “Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I’m teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious!”

— David Eddings

73. “I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.”

— David Eddings

74. “I taught in a small teacher’s college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn’t.”

— David Eddings

75. “If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.”

— David Eddings

76. “Why are the people all so unhappy?” he asked Mister Wolf. “They have a stern and demanding God,” Wolf replied. “Which God is that?” Garion asked. “Money,” Wolf said.”

— David Eddings

77. “I’m never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.”

— David Eddings

78. “Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand” – or even “million” – and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.”

— David Eddings

79. “The victories of the imagination involved no risks, and a confrontation with an enemy always ended satisfactorily when both sides of the conversation came from one’s own daydreams.”

— David Eddings

80. “Life without any wonder left in it is flat and stale.”

— David Eddings

81. “There was an almost musical flow to his illiterate speech, a kind of warm inclusiveness that paid no attention to any kind of social distinctions, and a shrewd, even penetrating, assessment of the chaos around him.”

— David Eddings

82. “You must learn that that’s what friends and family are for – to be imposed upon. One of the Cardinal Rules, if you want to get through life without overexerting yourself, is that, when all else fails, fall back on friends and relations.”

— David Eddings

83. “Any fool can raise an army, but you start running into trouble around suppertime.”

— David Eddings

84. “It keeps him happy, Dahlaine, and happy people are nicer than gloomy ones. Haven’t you noticed that before?”

— David Eddings

85. “I wrote a novel for my degree, and I’m very happy I didn’t submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.”

— David Eddings

86. “This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn’t even stand to look at it any more.”

— David Eddings

87. “What I’m trying to say, Garion,’ Durnik continued seriously, ’is that you can’t go through life being afraid of what you are. If you do that, sooner or later somebody will come along who’ll misunderstand, and you’ll have to do something to show him that it’s not him that you’re afraid of.”

— David Eddings

88. “Love, My Goddess loves us all, and she gave up Bhelliom willingly out of that love. Bhelliom can’t begin to understand love. In the end that may be our only defense against it.”

— David Eddings

89. “If you can’t do something about a situation, there’s no point in worrying about it.”

— David Eddings

90. “Morality deals with what we might like to do, but politics deals with what we must do. There’s no connection between them at all.”

— David Eddings

91. “By ostentation and propinquity to the throne, small men are able to avoid facing their own inadequacy.”

— David Eddings

92. “The land, indifferent to human boundaries, flowed on unchanged.”

— David Eddings

93. “Democratic Development is a process of political struggle in which democrats work gains the upper hand in the society over non-democrats which directs aid at core political processes and institutions especially elections, political parties and politically oriented civil groups.”

— David Eddings

94. “Don’t throw good ideas away until you’ve considered all of your options.”

— David Eddings

95. “If you don’t have calluses on your soul, writing isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.”

— David Eddings

96. “Refusing to talk about something wouldn’t make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.”

— David Eddings

97. “We was doing a lot of what our officers called “maneuvering” – which is officer talk for running.”

— David Eddings

98. “Is it? If somebody forces you to do something and there’s no possible way to avoid it, is it really sin?”

— David Eddings

99. “As he grew, the other children grew as well – all except poor Doroon, who seemed doomed to be short and skinny all his life. Rundorig.”

— David Eddings

100. “Priests are pretty much the same the world over. They seem to feel that their exclusive contact with God gives them a certain job security.”

— David Eddings