Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “All men are not created equal,” he declares. Tall, imperious, an eagle of a man. “The weak have deceived you. They would say the meek should inherit the Earth. That the strong should nurture the gentle. This is the Noble Lie of Demokracy. The cancer that poisoned mankind.”

— Pierce Brown

152. “You cannot stop this. The reason I tell you all this is to disabuse you of that delusion of grandeur. You are small, as am I. But you can be a part of something, Mr. Horn. A part of the solution to this dark age.”

— Pierce Brown

153. “She left me to give me anger, and I cannot help but hate her for a moment even though beyond that moment there is only love.”

— Pierce Brown

154. “Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion, one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they don’t. Until their hearts explode.”

— Pierce Brown

155. “It’s not victory that makes a man. It’s his defeats.”

— Pierce Brown

156. “I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath.”

— Pierce Brown

157. “That’s what Society does – spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes.”

— Pierce Brown

158. “I suppose that is what every man must tell himself in war.” His voice rasps and he sucks again on the water tube. “That there will be an end, and when it is done, enough of himself will remain. Enough to be a father. A brother. A lover. But we know it isn’t true. Don’t we, Darrow? War eats the victors last.”

— Pierce Brown

159. “Pride is just a shout into the wind.”

— Pierce Brown

160. “What kind of a parent would want their children to have servants? The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything.”

— Pierce Brown

161. “Suffering isn’t real to them. War isn’t real. It’s just a three-letter word for other people that they see in the digital newsfeeds. Just a stream of uncomfortable images they skip past. A whole business of weapons and arms and ships and hierarchies they don’t even notice, all to shield these fools from the true agony of what it means to be human.”

— Pierce Brown

162. “Thank you, Matteo,” I say, tears in my eyes. I pick him up and hug him despite his protests. “If I live more than a week, I’ll have you to thank, my goodman.” He blushes when I set him down. “Manage your temper,” he reminds me, his small voice darkening. “Manners, manners, then burn their bloodydamn house to the ground.”

— Pierce Brown

163. “The Gold spits. “You send a dog to do your fighting?” “I am a man!” Ragnar roars louder than the screaming engines of a passing ship.”

— Pierce Brown

164. “She listens because she’s heard enough noise to know that truth, if it ever appears, creeps in on quiet little feet.”

— Pierce Brown

165. “Amazing the power you have when you’re bloody up to the sleeves and none of it is your own.”

— Pierce Brown

166. “There’s nothing like a mother’s fear.”

— Pierce Brown

167. “Rise so high, in mud you lie.”

— Pierce Brown

168. “Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything. Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men.”

— Pierce Brown

169. “And what was that about blood brothers? That means absolutely nothing. You might as well have said you were pinecone cousins.”

— Pierce Brown

170. “I admire one to my left, the bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment – one I know I shall never forget – so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory.”

— Pierce Brown

171. “Imagine there was a table covered with fleas,” he explains. “The fleas would jump and jump to heights unknown. Then a man came along and upturned a glass jar over the fleas. The fleas jumped and hit the top of the jar and could go no farther. Then the man removed the jar and yet the fleas did not jump higher than they had grown accustomed, because they believed there to still be a glass ceiling.”

— Pierce Brown

172. “I no longer trust stillness. Stillness is the enemy taking careful aim.”

— Pierce Brown

173. “Perhaps one day I’ll have two hearts to give.”

— Pierce Brown

174. “For seven hundred years, my people have been enslaved without voice, without hope. Now I am their sword. And I do not forgive. I do not forget. So let him lead me onto his shuttle. Let him think he owns me. Let him welcome me into his house, so I might burn it down.”

— Pierce Brown

175. “I am not alone. I am not his victim. So let him do his worst. I am the Reaper. I know how to suffer. I know the darkness.”

— Pierce Brown

176. “I hate how my body shivers at the idea of glory. There’s something deep in man that hungers for this. But I think it weakness, not strength, to abandon decency for that strange darker spirit.”

— Pierce Brown

177. “And when you hang from the gallows. When the door beneath you opens, when your feet do the Devil’s Dance, then you will realize in that moment that this has all been for nothing, because there will be no one left to pull your feet.”

— Pierce Brown

178. “Nothing has ever been enough for you, nor will it be. You’re trying to matter to yourself. Because you’re broken inside. Because you hate what you are.”

— Pierce Brown

179. “Seeing the joy in my wife’s face, I am witnessing another miracle. One, for a long time, I believed I would never see again. Love so potent, so whole and true, that it hurts, because even when you convince yourself that it will last forever, you know enough of the world to see how things break and fade, but somehow, some way, you believe this love will be the exception. That it alone will last.”

— Pierce Brown

180. “Always negotiate with food.”

— Pierce Brown

181. “Some men have threads of life so strong that they fray and snap those around them.”

— Pierce Brown

182. “They want a leader, and if the Reaper of Mars decides to come back from the dead here... you won’t have an army, you’ll have a tide at your heels.”

— Pierce Brown

183. “If the need arises I’ve got myself a psychotic Goblin-sized fighter jet.”

— Pierce Brown

184. “There is a festival where we wear the faces of demons to ward evil spirits from our dead in the vale. The faces sparkle with fool’s gold.”

— Pierce Brown

185. “Well, I do believe I am the lightning,” Cassius declares. “And you, my brooding friend, are the thunder.”

— Pierce Brown

186. “He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness.”

— Pierce Brown

187. “You’re making me emotional, and I hate it.”

— Pierce Brown

188. “War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear.”

— Pierce Brown

189. “We chosen few are the fire of our people.” I beat my chest. “We are not Red, not Blue or Gold or Gray or Obsidian. We are humanity. We are the tide. And.”

— Pierce Brown

190. “I learn more when I make mistakes, so long as they don’t kill me.”

— Pierce Brown

191. “Everything she is dwells behind her eyes. She has her father’s mind. Her mother’s face. And a distant, foreboding sort of intelligence that can give you wings or crush you to the earth.”

— Pierce Brown

192. “Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”

— Pierce Brown

193. “We all have our own tides inside. They go in. Out.” He shrugs. “Not really ours to control. The things, people, that orbit us do that, at least more than we’d like to admit.”

— Pierce Brown

194. “There’s nothing worse for a soldier to imagine – that there will be no home to return to once the violence is over, no way to become the men we want to be. Instead, we’re trapped in these violent guises, guises we only ever had the courage to don because of how much we love our home. Is this all we’ll ever be?”

— Pierce Brown

195. “And it beats inside me, this terrible hope, as I know that the end has begun, and I am finally awake. “Break the chains,” I roar. And my people roar back.”

— Pierce Brown

196. “You tell anyone I cried, I’ll find a dead fish, put it in a sock, hide it in your room, and let it putrefy.”

— Pierce Brown

197. “You’re acting like you share a secret language all of a sudden.” “Isn’t that always the case with those who’ve read the same books?”

— Pierce Brown

198. “Love may give one wings, but everything burns when it flies too close to the sun.”

— Pierce Brown

199. “There are things you know, but when revealed to be known by others can make the world shine in a peculiar way.”

— Pierce Brown

200. “Forget malice or anger. All should beware the wrath of an offended soul.”

— Pierce Brown