Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “This is your slingBlade, son. It will scrape the earth’s veins for you. It will kill pitvipers. Keep it sharp and if you get stuck in the drills, it will save your life for the price of a limb.” So said my uncle.”

— Pierce Brown

152. “Love is the stars, and its light carries on long after death.”

— Pierce Brown

153. “El fuego de la victoria me arde en las venas.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

155. “Everyone’s honest till they’re caught in a lie.”

— Pierce Brown

156. “Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

158. “Humans, no matter their Color, are fragile as doves in the meat grinder of war.”

— Pierce Brown

159. “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

160. “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

161. “We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us.”

— Pierce Brown

162. “There is evil in us, as there is good. But we do not regret our good as we do our evil. So we know what we are, my daughter. We know what we are.”

— Pierce Brown

163. “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

164. “Once, the worlds called Cassius the Morning Knight, protector of the Society, slayer of Ares. Then he murdered his Sovereign, my grandmother, and let the Rising tear down the very Society he swore to protect. He let Darrow destroy my world and bring chaos to the Society. I can never forgive him for that, but neither can I repay the debt I owe him. He kept Sevro au Barca from killing me.”

— Pierce Brown

165. “Pity is not forgiveness, nor is gratitude absolution.”

— Pierce Brown

166. “All my people sing of are memories. And so I will remember this death. It will burden me as it does not burden my fellow students – I must not let that change. I must not become like them. I’ll remember that every sin, every death, every sacrifice, is for freedom.”

— Pierce Brown

167. “They say a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. They made no mention of the heart.”

— Pierce Brown

168. “I am a child of hell, and I’ve spent too long in their heaven.”

— Pierce Brown

169. “As a human, I am entitled only to death.”

— Pierce Brown

170. “It is my duty as a free man to read so I’m not blind being lead around by my nose.”

— Pierce Brown

171. “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

172. “To win, I’ll need an army, but it cannot be made of slaves. Not again. I now need, as I’ll need at the head of a rebellion, followers, not slaves. Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it. A.”

— Pierce Brown

173. “She’s an engineer of oppression, and one of the best minds of Gold. And she tried to kill Sevro. Bad play.”

— Pierce Brown

174. “Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history.”

— Pierce Brown

175. “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

176. “Love and war. Same coin. Different sides. I’m too wrinkled for either.” “Maybe war will breathe some life into your old bones.” “Well, I tried love last month.” He leans close. “Didn’t work like it used to.”

— Pierce Brown

177. “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

178. “Better to go into that world in the full glory of some passion than to fade and wither with age. Live fast. Die young, my wayward friend.”

— Pierce Brown

179. “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

180. “Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

182. “A man thinks he can fly, but he is afraid to jump. A poor friend pushes him from behind.” He looks up at me. “A good friend jumps with.”

— Pierce Brown

183. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he was too weak to deserve life.”

— Pierce Brown

184. “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

185. “But I cannot think only of the Red girl. When I see the moon, I think of the sun: Mustang burns in my thoughts. If Eo smelled of rust and soil, then the Golden girl is fire and autumn leaves.”

— Pierce Brown

186. “Forgetting is essential to learning, just as exhaling is essential to breathing. Breathe out, then in. Find the self, then lose it once again. Thus, the path goes ever onward.”

— Pierce Brown

187. “Lorn once told me if he had been my father he would have raised me to be a good man. ‘There’s no peace for great men,’ he said.” I smile at the memory. “I should have asked him who he thinks makes the peace for all those good men.”

— Pierce Brown

188. “I kept looking for hope in the world. Expecting the world to supply deliverance if I plucked the right chords. Demanding that it supply validation to my labor if I just gave enough effort. But that is not the nature of the world. Its nature is to consume. In time, it will consume us all, and the spheres will spin until they too are consumed when our sun dies. Maybe that is the point of it. Knowing that though one day darkness will cover all, at least your eyes were open to see moments of light.”

— Pierce Brown

189. “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

190. “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

191. “I now need, as I’ll need at the head of a rebellion, followers, not slaves. Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.”

— Pierce Brown

192. “For seven hundred years, we have been enslaved. Your people. My people. We have languished in the darkness. Bu there will come a day when we walk in the light. It will not come from their mercy. It will not come by fate. It will come when brave hearts rise and choose to break the chains.”

— Pierce Brown

193. “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

194. “You make one tribe out of twelve,” I finally say. “By taking slaves.” Just like the Society. Build on the backs of others. It isn’t cruel. It is practical. Fitchner claps mockingly. “Prime, Reaper. Prime. Looks like someone is bucking for Primus.”

— Pierce Brown

195. “Fear rides in me. Fear of so many things. Fear of letting down my friends, of losing my friends.”

— Pierce Brown

196. “How sad, the dependability of greed to make men fools.”

— Pierce Brown

197. “Polemides is Greek for “child of war.”

— Pierce Brown

198. “Things are set in stone. Things are well ordered. Reds at the bottom, everyone else standing on our backs. Now you’re looking at me and you’re realizing that we don’t bloodydamn like it down there. Red is rising, Mickey.”

— Pierce Brown

199. “She will not come back, but her beauty, her voice, will echo until the end of time. She believed in something beyond herself, and her death gave her voice power it didn’t have in life.”

— Pierce Brown

200. “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