Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “There will dawn a day when these hostile hours, these days of hatred and violence, seem the faintest of memories, but dark and steep and long is the road up out of hell. So do not tire, do not despair, do not abandon your brethren, and do not forget that through this darkness we and we alone carry the light of freedom. We must defend it with every cell in our bodies. If not now, when? If not us, who?”

— Pierce Brown

352. “The key to learning, to power, to having the final say in everything, is observation. By all means, be a storm inside, but save your movement and wind till you know your purpose.”

— Pierce Brown

353. “And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.”

— Pierce Brown

354. “It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself.”

— Pierce Brown

355. “But I am no Gold. I am a Red.”

— Pierce Brown

356. “I said I would give you justice. Vengeance is an empty thing, Darrow.”

— Pierce Brown

357. “You think a dream is worth dying for. I say it isn’t. You say it’s better to die on your feet. I say it’s better to live on our knees.”

— Pierce Brown

358. “The winged girl has become a carrion bird and she doesn’t seem to have noticed. I wonder if she’d smile so broadly if she had to kill all those people with a knife. How easy we make mass murder.”

— Pierce Brown

359. “It is strange. This boy likes me. He insults me, but he likes me.”

— Pierce Brown

360. “You are going to do great things, Darrow.” She never calls me Darrow. “Maybe you don’t have to do them alone?”

— Pierce Brown

361. “It has been years since I’ve ridden a horse, and in all of human history, how many have graced the back of such a terrible prize as this? I fear disgracing this king of horses more than I do the coming violence.”

— Pierce Brown

362. “Titus has failed. And so, as do those of any tyrant after a failed war, his eyes turn inward.”

— Pierce Brown

363. “They are coming for me. Or am I coming for them? I do not know. I try to feel like the predator, but I cannot. My rage is calming. It is slowing and giving way to fear as the halls stretch on.”

— Pierce Brown

364. “Her world is alien to the horrors I know. All the child sees is love.”

— Pierce Brown

365. “Dreamers die bad.”

— Pierce Brown

366. “I told myself I would be better than this. I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility.”

— Pierce Brown

367. “An Imperator commands each fleet; a Praetor commands squadrons within that fleet.”

— Pierce Brown

368. “So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet.”

— Pierce Brown

369. “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

370. “How can we promise freedom and then be the arbiter of a people’s choices? That is not freedom. That is social engineering. That is the long road to tyranny.”

— Pierce Brown

371. “It takes more to hope than to remember.”

— Pierce Brown

372. “The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why.”

— Pierce Brown

373. “Go on. What about her? Come on, man. You killed my brothers. I killed Fitchner. It’s already awkward.”

— Pierce Brown

374. “I’ve never been a man of joy or a man of war, or an island in a storm. Never an absolute like Lorn. That was what I pretended to be. I am and always have been a man who is made complete by those around him. I.”

— Pierce Brown

375. “But even as I yearn for it, I fear it. Because the more I see of this cruel world, the less I believe it ends in some pleasant fiction.”

— Pierce Brown

376. “Silly Poet. Haven’t you wondered where Sevro is?”

— Pierce Brown

377. “I wish I knew that the eyes of his spirit looked upon his Vale. That his ancestors were waiting for him in their cool highland valley. But I know it is not so, because I know the Vale was created and cultivated by the Board of Quality Control in order to provide an important sociological prerequisite for obedience: a carrot at the end of a hard life. That very same belief that made them able to endure untold hardship in the mines has become a militant faith.”

— Pierce Brown

378. “He doesn’t have a knife or a bat. No, he has something I’m far more interested in. A question mark of a sword. A slingBlade for reaping grain.”

— Pierce Brown

379. “Our age is ending. I feel the days shortening. The brief light dimming upon the kingdom of man.”

— Pierce Brown

380. “If he is treating them like Pinks, then it is because they merited no better in this little world than Pinks do in our big world.” “You’re joking.” Cassius can’t understand. “They are Golds, not Pinks. He’s a monster.”

— Pierce Brown

381. “Fitchner scratches his groin with his razor’s hilt. His manners are worse than mine.”

— Pierce Brown

382. “But you must never let your mind sleep. Your Mind’s Eye must rove without rest. Even as you speak, eat, move, it is not enough for it to collect data, it must digest it as a subfunction, or you will miss something and become a slave to another.”

— Pierce Brown

383. “He was never the brightest, not in the way they wanted. Oh, he was kind and bright with emotions – he could sense sadness or anger a klick away. But empathy is a lowColor thing.”

— Pierce Brown

384. “Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.”

— Pierce Brown

385. “Nothing binds like pain shared.”

— Pierce Brown

386. “We are the new age. The new world. And if we’re to show the way, then we better damn well make it a better one. I am Sevro au Barca. And I am no longer afraid.”

— Pierce Brown

387. “Slaves do not have the bravery of free men. That is why Golds lie to lowReds and make them think they are brave. That is why they lie to Obsidians and make them think it is an honor to serve gods. Easier than the truth. Yet it takes only one truth to bring a kingdom of lies crashing down. Ragnar.”

— Pierce Brown

388. “The tide has risen. And I feel a deep terror in wondering exactly what it will wash away.”

— Pierce Brown

389. “One cannot make a mouse a lion.” “He can think like a lion.”

— Pierce Brown

390. “Even stranger, I desperately want him to like me. Why? I think it is because I feel as though he is the only one, including Roque and Cassius, who understands life. He is ugly in a world where he should be beautiful, and because of his deficiencies, he was chosen to die. He, in many ways, is no better than a Red.”

— Pierce Brown

391. “My heart breaks for who you were,” he says. “For that boy who watched his wife die. My heart broke in that garden. It breaks now knowing all you suffered.”

— Pierce Brown

392. “Slow power can grind away any stagnant enemy. But fast power, one that can travel where you go, do what you wish it to as effectively as a hammer hitting a nail, that is the power that lops off heads and steals crowns. Can I trust you with it?”

— Pierce Brown

393. “Will you accept these stains, godchild?”

— Pierce Brown

394. “Chains might be made by others, but we tend them.”

— Pierce Brown

395. “In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked.”

— Pierce Brown

396. “I always thought I would die before the end. I trudged on knowing I was doomed. But my friends have breathed love into me, breathed my faith back into my bones. They’ve made me want to live.”

— Pierce Brown

397. “One must worry about the strength of a principle when it must compromise itself so often to survive.”

— Pierce Brown

398. “It’s not the bark that counts, oldboy. It’s the bite.”

— Pierce Brown

399. “It fills me with a strange emptiness knowing that I was enough for her when I was never enough for Eo.”

— Pierce Brown

400. “What good is being smarter than everyone if no one listens? Is this how my father felt? My brother? Is evil born of pure frustration?”

— Pierce Brown