Top 60 Max Gladstone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing.”

— Max Gladstone

2. “You see. He thinks of conversations like a chess game, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

— Max Gladstone

3. “I do not understand you. But neither do I understand fire, or starlight, or storms, and I love them.”

— Max Gladstone

4. “Words can wound, but they’re bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound.”

— Max Gladstone

5. “Love lasts longer than either party to that love might want.”

— Max Gladstone

6. “You’re my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerers who I’d happily gut on the altar of that pyramid and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you.”

— Max Gladstone

7. “So easy to look out at the world through warped glass and think the world was warped itself. Easy, too, to live in a warped world and forget that, with effort, you could make crooked lines straight.”

— Max Gladstone

8. “She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara’s bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child’s face.”

— Max Gladstone

9. “I have observed friendships as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate behavior, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.”

— Max Gladstone

10. “Justice is like math, anyone can think she knows the answer, but not every answer is right.”

— Max Gladstone

11. “Deathless Kings, High Priests, let’s call them the thaumaturgical class, are growing used to power and the resources that accompany it. They form a distinct, large pool of exacting consumers of durable bespoke luxury goods.”

— Max Gladstone

12. “We cannot save our clients from themselves. Someday in your career, Elayne, you will represent a man – almost certainly a man – who wants you to help him barter his soul to a demon for three wishes. When that day comes you may refuse his business, you may try to change his mind, but in the end if hell he wants, hell he will achieve.”

— Max Gladstone

13. “Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.”

— Max Gladstone

14. “And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks. Up.”

— Max Gladstone

15. “He sighed. “There is one thing you must understand about destroying gods, boy.” “Only one?” “You must be ready to take their place.”

— Max Gladstone

16. “Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven’t been on a date since the late eighties.”

— Max Gladstone

17. “The world’s a complicated place, and it changes, that’s all. People interpret the universe, and their interpretation alters it.”

— Max Gladstone

18. “Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”

— Max Gladstone

19. “Sixty years ago, these men and women broke the heavens, and made the gods weep. They had spent the time since learning how hard it was to run a world.”

— Max Gladstone

20. “Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.”

— Max Gladstone

21. “The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it’s stupid about death.”

— Max Gladstone

22. “He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also,” she said after a pause, “he moisturizes.”

— Max Gladstone

23. “Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn’t matter so you don’t have to worry about it.”

— Max Gladstone

24. “Affairs had fallen out better this time than forty years ago, but still he yearned for the water. Land lied to the feet, and to the soul. You stand, it whispered, upon unchanging ground. You build upon certainty, and your foundations will never crumble.”

— Max Gladstone

25. “Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.”

— Max Gladstone

26. “Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. “I told you so” had not been on the list. The.”

— Max Gladstone

27. “So you assume we go around painting ourselves with pitch and swooping from rooftops to devour innocents, and call ourselves things like Shale Swiftwing, Beloved of the Goddess, Scout-in-Shadows.”

— Max Gladstone

28. “Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.”

— Max Gladstone

29. “You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf – when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.”

— Max Gladstone

30. “You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?”

— Max Gladstone

31. “Someone else had made her a weapon, but she made herself kind.”

— Max Gladstone

32. “It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.”

— Max Gladstone

33. “The night’s triumph is inevitable as prophecy, but wet air holds the day’s heat, sweaty fingers tangled in solar curls.”

— Max Gladstone

34. “Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.”

— Max Gladstone

35. “Engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict.” Tara.”

— Max Gladstone

36. “Learn so you can work. Practice so you can play. Follow so you can lead. No one stays who she is forever.”

— Max Gladstone

37. “A shadow follows her. She has no proof, but she knows, as bones know their breaking stress.”

— Max Gladstone

38. “To live is to grow secrets.”

— Max Gladstone

39. “She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk – or worse, speaking German.”

— Max Gladstone

40. “What can we do in the face of fear? What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.”

— Max Gladstone

41. “Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.”

— Max Gladstone

42. “Always know the shape you take – know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.”

— Max Gladstone

43. “Yes,” she said. “It makes you the most stupid, single-minded collection of religious fanatics I’ve ever come across. I mean,” she amended as growls rose about her and green eyes narrowed, “I could not imagine ever doing something like that, but it’s terribly sweet.”

— Max Gladstone

44. “Meditation handbooks from Sheer Peaks monasteries advised the practitioner to envision herself midcopulation with a sensory lushness from which even an Iskari romance might shrink – and then to envision one’s partner undergoing the many stages of death and decomposition, until one lay in congress with a skeleton. Which proved, to Kai’s mind, that monks were a lot kinkier than most people gave them credit.”

— Max Gladstone

45. “Adventure works in any strand. It calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

— Max Gladstone

46. “Humans need to dream, you know. It’s how the mind breathes.”

— Max Gladstone

47. “Craft could transport the soul to wage war on strange planes above the corpses of dead gods, but ultimately there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body.”

— Max Gladstone

48. “So in this letter, I am yours.”

— Max Gladstone

49. “If we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain one another.”

— Max Gladstone

50. “Anger’s hotter than a star, and endures where stars do not.”

— Max Gladstone