Top 60 Nicholas Eames Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If it sounds like a sheep but looks like a lion, it’s probably a lion.”

— Nicholas Eames

2. “Hubris, man. It’s killed more heroes than monsters ever did.”

— Nicholas Eames

3. “We were giants once, remember? Kings of the Wyld.”

— Nicholas Eames

4. “This is not a choice between life and death, but life and immortality! Remain here and die in obscurity, or follow me now and live forever!”

— Nicholas Eames

5. “It was a kobold’s hovel, and that meant shithole.”

— Nicholas Eames

6. “We are each what the past has made of us. You would do well to remember what has come and gone before. Time is a circle, history a turning wheel.”

— Nicholas Eames

7. “Don’t be a corpse, Clay prayed under his breath. Please, don’t be a corpse. Moog had been a staunch enemy of necromancy his entire life, but when you left lonely old wizards in ancient towers for too long, it stood to reason they’d start meddling with dark and unfathomable powers sooner or later.”

— Nicholas Eames

8. “Watch this!” he said, and what happened next might have been extraordinarily funny were their lives not at stake. But they were, so it wasn’t.”

— Nicholas Eames

9. “Who didn’t enjoy the glassy stare of a severed animal’s head gazing down at them as they ate supper?”

— Nicholas Eames

10. “Pike,” Clay said by way of greeting. “Heard you were dead.” “Close. Married.”

— Nicholas Eames

11. “The world is big, the young are restless, and girls just want to have fun.”

— Nicholas Eames

12. “This day, this moment, is when you step out from the shadow of the past. Today you make your name. Today your legend is born. Come tomorrow, every tale the bards tell will belong to you, because today we save the world!”

— Nicholas Eames

13. “It’s not enough to survive what we do, Tam. We must also endure it.” “What’s the difference?” she asked. “One concerns the body, the other the mind. Every battle has a cost,” he said quietly. “Even the ones we win.”

— Nicholas Eames

14. “I spat in the face of death, and death could do nothing but rage in impotence as I worked up another mouthful of phlegm.”

— Nicholas Eames

15. “Another lie. But lies, as her uncle Bran was fond of saying, were like a cup of Kaskar whiskey: If you’re in for one, you’re in for a dozen.”

— Nicholas Eames

16. “Her smiles were shorter. Her laugh was louder. She became distracted at times, and would stare at nothing with a look of shattered sorrow that passed like a cloud the moment someone spoke her name. She loved less quickly, but more fiercely, and made certain that those she cared for knew it well. Sometimes she wept when it snowed.”

— Nicholas Eames

17. “The ship, which appeared to belong to another band, was just passing by for a look. She was bigger than the Old Glory, but not by much. The words Lucky Seven had been painted on her belly, but the seven had been crossed out, as had the six below it. The word five was scrawled underneath, but Clay only spotted four people at the rail and wondered silently if the ship was due for another paint job.”

— Nicholas Eames

18. “He had heard it said by an exceptionally clever bard that if you tried to number the ways you could die in the Heartwyld you’d be dead before you finished counting.”

— Nicholas Eames

19. “Clay considered offering up the fact that it wasn’t just Saga coming to her rescue, but a wine-swilling ghoul, an amnesiac daeva, and a half-blind ettin were along for the ride as well. Then again, if something sounded ridiculous in your head, then voicing it aloud rarely did it any favours.”

— Nicholas Eames

20. “But even a coward found his courage in a corner, and there were things even a craven heart could not allow.”

— Nicholas Eames

21. “Even when she and her father were at odds – when something one of them said wounded the other deeper than intended – she had always known that he loved her.”

— Nicholas Eames

22. “But what does a mirror know? What can it show us of ourselves? Oh, it might reveal a few scars, and perhaps a glimpse – there, in the eyes – of our true nature. The spirit beneath the skin. Yet the deepest scars are often hidden, and though a mirror might reveal our weakness, it reflects only a fraction of our strength.”

— Nicholas Eames

23. “Clay found himself smiling, recalling the first time he and his bandmates had paraded the spoils of their own Heartwyld tour down this very same street –not that there was much to recall, since they’d all been blind drunk at the time. Moog had slept through most of it; Matrick had fallen from the wagon into the crowd and was missing for three days.”

— Nicholas Eames

24. “The monstrous wolf was the size of a Cascar plow horse, and Clay had just begun composing his death scream – he was thinking something high-pitched, sort of, er, ‘falling from a great height’ meets, ‘I just shat my pants’ with a touch of, ‘petulant little girl doesn’t get her way’ thrown in to spice things up – when he heard a deep growling behind him.”

— Nicholas Eames

25. “Funny, Tam thought, how different a thing could seem at a distance – how beautiful, despite the ugly truth. Was it worth it, she wondered, to look closer? To examine something, or someone, if doing so risked changing your perception of them forever after? She was young enough to think the answer was yes, but too young to know if she was right.”

— Nicholas Eames

26. “Solitude can do troubling things to a mind.”

— Nicholas Eames

27. “A tiger, however fearsome, could be hunted into a corner. It fought alone, so it died alone. But to hunt a wolf was to constantly look over your shoulder, wondering if others were behind you in the dark. “Lost?”

— Nicholas Eames

28. “Some people knew how to kill a conversation. Cura, on the other hand, could make it wish it had never been born.”

— Nicholas Eames

29. “Or not lost, he considered, since they lingered on in the hearts of those who loved them, who love them still, their memory nurtured like a sprig of green in an otherwise desolate soul. Which was, he supposed, a kind of immortality, after all.”

— Nicholas Eames

30. “And so it goes, thought Clay. Life was funny, and fickle, and often cruel. Sometimes the unworthy went on living, while those who deserved better were lost.”

— Nicholas Eames

31. “I had a cat named Astra. Spiteful creature! And vicious.” He whistled. “I swear, it once killed a bird and left it on my doorstep in the morning.” Brune shrugged. “So what? Lots of cats – ” “It was an eagle,” Moog finished. The shaman nodded appreciatively and poured himself a drink.”

— Nicholas Eames

32. “Lucky,” said Gabriel. Clay glanced at him sidelong. “I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.” “We.”

— Nicholas Eames

33. “A pinecone?” “Ha! Can you imagine? All this at stake and I give you a pinecone?” Moog’s cackle died in silence, and everyone simply stared until he went on. “Okay, yes, it’s a pinecone. But it’s a magic pinecone.”

— Nicholas Eames

34. “There were, naturally, several casualties during the course of the fair, but what was any good party without a few deaths?”

— Nicholas Eames

35. “Would you look at us, Clay thought scathingly. We, who might once have faced down a dragon and only stopped to ask how it preferred to get its ass kicked, baulking at glow-in-the-dark spiders!”

— Nicholas Eames

36. “A satyr? What’s it doing here?” Brune ambled up next to her, blew on a spoonful of steaming oatmeal, and shovelled it into his mouth. “Puking,” he said, unhelpfully, and then called out to the creature below.”

— Nicholas Eames

37. “You run away as fast as you can, and I give you a five-second head start before I tell these boys – ” he motioned at the two looming sentinels “ – to make you the meat in a golem sandwich.”

— Nicholas Eames

38. “The druins were brilliant craftsmen and powerful sorcerers, who ruled with the liberty of gods over the then-primitive tribes of men and monsters. But as with anything that grows too big for its own good – ambitious spiderwebs, for instance, or those giant, late-harvest pumpkins – it became something altogether monstrous, and eventually collapsed on itself. The.”

— Nicholas Eames

39. “As individuals they were each of them fallible, discordant as notes without harmony. But as a band they were something more, something perfect in its own intangible way.”

— Nicholas Eames

40. “We slept beside them, fought beside them, bled beside them. We trusted them to watch our backs and save our asses – which they did, time and time again. And somewhere out there, between one gig and the next, something changed. We woke up one day and realized that home was no longer behind us. That our families were with us all along. We looked around at these miscreants, these motley crews, and knew in our hearts there was nowhere we’d rather be than by their side.”

— Nicholas Eames

41. “We were giants, once.”

— Nicholas Eames

42. “A battle, as relayed by a poet, is a glorious thing, full of heroic stands, daring charges, and valiant sacrifice. But a battlefield, as experienced by some poor bastard mired in the thick of it, is something different altogether. The word clusterfuck came to mind.”

— Nicholas Eames

43. “But then Rose pointed toward the woman’s feet. “You dropped your ear,” she said. And Astra – who’d been an empress, then a goddess, and whose dark sorcery now threatened to snuff out every soul in Grandual – looked down. Like an idiot.”

— Nicholas Eames

44. “Most people, she figured, sized up the truth when it came knocking, decided they didn’t much like the look of it, and shut the door in its face.”

— Nicholas Eames

45. “But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall.”

— Nicholas Eames

46. “Despite this, his prejudice against helmets remained unchanged. You had your pride, Ganelon had told him once, or you had nothing.”

— Nicholas Eames

47. “You don’t find glory at a fair. It isn’t something that just lands in your lap. You need to go after it and take it for yourself.”

— Nicholas Eames

48. “And what are those things that look like dragons and sound like dragons?” he asked facetiously. “I believe they’re called dragons, boss.” “Thank you, Ashe.” He sighed heavily and dragged his fingers through his shaggy hair.”

— Nicholas Eames

49. “Are all of us broken? Tam wondered. Each of us scarred in some way by our fathers, our mothers, our harsh and heartless pasts?”

— Nicholas Eames

50. “He considered going for his hammer, which lay just out of reach, or maybe diving for Ganelon instead, since waking the warrior was probably his best hope of survival.”

— Nicholas Eames