Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Everything he says is perfectly innocuous. Yet I hate him. It’s like he doesn’t think me a human; instead I’m just a chess piece and he’s waiting to move me around. No. Shove me around. He somehow forgot to be seventeen or eighteen like the rest. He is a man.”

— Pierce Brown

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Pierce Brown

406. “There is no morality to him. No goodness. No evil intent when he killed Eo. He believes he is beyond morality. His aspirations are so grand that he has become inhuman in his desperate desire to preserve humanity.”

— Pierce Brown

407. “Any fool can stick a blade into another’s belly. The school’s role is to find the leaders of men, not the killers of men. So the point, you silly little children, is not to kill, but to conquer.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

409. “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

410. “He is the monster they don’t know how to write stories about. You cannot trust him.” The.”

— Pierce Brown

411. “What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.”

— Pierce Brown

412. “In his eyes I glimpse the loneliness, the longing for a life that should have been, and the glimmer of the man he wants to be underneath the man he thinks he has to be.”

— Pierce Brown

413. “We must save ourselves from ourselves before the inheritance of humanity is ash.”

— Pierce Brown

414. “Life is the most effective school ever created.”

— Pierce Brown

415. “I panic as suicides do when they realize their folly.”

— Pierce Brown

416. “As her voice finally swells and the song runs out of words, I know I have lost her. She becomes something more important; and she was right, I do not understand.”

— Pierce Brown

417. “Anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.”

— Pierce Brown

418. “I’m all that’s left of that family that could have been. A dark shadow of the man I was meant to be.”

— Pierce Brown

419. “I cannot be afraid. I’ve spent too long being afraid. Too long being diminished by loss. Too long being everything except what I need to be. And whether I am the Reaper, or whether it’s just another mask, it’s one I must wear, not just for them, but for myself.”

— Pierce Brown

420. “It’s a lonely thing carrying the body of someone dead and loved. Like a vase you know will never again hold flowers. I.”

— Pierce Brown

421. “Your firstborn son, Claudius, was all a man could hope for – a son better and wiser than his father.”

— Pierce Brown

422. “So the answer is autonomy,” I say. “Maybe.” She bites her lip. Later that night, she elaborates. “It’s like a hand.”

— Pierce Brown

423. “Because there is a boy here like you.” Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. “My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals.” Her eyes implore me. “So please, hurry up and evolve.”

— Pierce Brown

424. “Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable.”

— Pierce Brown

425. “His eyes are darker and crueler than those of the friend I remember. “This is war, boyo. Murder’s the name of the game. Don’t be sad we’re good at it.”

— Pierce Brown

426. “How sad I didn’t cherish a moment there with my son. All moments are like that sandcastle, it seems. There is no permanent happy future. There is no Vale. It all washes away.”

— Pierce Brown

427. “Eat the fish, leave twenty percent to indicate its deliciousness did not overpower my resolve or make slaves of my taste-buds.”

— Pierce Brown

428. “Tactus is an Iron Gold. His blood is as old as the Society. They look at compassion, at reform, as a disease. He is his family. He will not change. He will not learn. He believes in power. Other Colors are not people to him. Lesser Golds are not people to him. He is bound to his fate.”

— Pierce Brown

429. “This is the future. It should not be this way for generations. My life is a lie.”

— Pierce Brown

430. “If you are thrown into the deep and do not swim, you will drown... so keep swimming, right?”

— Pierce Brown

431. “Half the clans are already drunk when we arrive in the Common. In addition to a dancing people, we’re a drunken people. The Tinpots let us alone in that. Hang a man for no real reason and you might get some grumblings from the townships. But force sobriety upon us, and you’ll be picking up the pieces for a bloodydamn month.”

— Pierce Brown

432. “And they’ve no chance to get back the owl standard that glitters in his muddy hands. The cook unconscious across my saddle, we ride under the starry night back to our battle-torn highlands, the three of us laughing, cheering, howling.”

— Pierce Brown

433. “The bonds that bind us together are stronger than the forces that pull us apart.”

— Pierce Brown

434. “And with a great pull, I rip out the tongue of the Jackal.”

— Pierce Brown

435. “He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness. He is the Society – a monster dripping in decadence, yet seeing none of his own hypocrisy. He views all this wealth, all this power, as his right. He is deluded. They all are. But I cannot cut him down from the front. No, no matter how well I fight. He is too strong.”

— Pierce Brown

436. “Whisper her name.” I do and the Pegasus unfurls like a haemanthus bud. He sets a petal in the center. It closes again. “This is your heart. Guard it with iron.”

— Pierce Brown

437. “A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.”

— Pierce Brown

438. “Goldbrows’ first loyalty is to Color, then family, then planet, then House. Most Houses are dominated by one or two powerful families. On Mars, the Family Augustus, the Family Bellona, and the Family Arcos influence all others.”

— Pierce Brown

439. “These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines. The.”

— Pierce Brown

440. “Come ask for one when you’re Scarred, little prince.” She looks over her shoulder. “Until then, I would advise you and the reaper to run.”

— Pierce Brown

441. “She moves across the snow in a daze to grip her twin brother’s feet. Looking up at him as if this were a dream. She whispers something and, lowering her head, she pulls down, showing him he was loved, even at the end.”

— Pierce Brown

442. “It’s there, even if you never see it till the end – that spark of individuality, of freedom.”

— Pierce Brown

443. “Protect the ArchGovernor!” Mustang shouts at me, voice more composed than my own, making me feel an idiot obsessed with chivalry. Of course she does not need me to save her.”

— Pierce Brown

444. “THE REAPER Silent, he lies encased in mankilling metal in the belly of a starship called the Morning Star.”

— Pierce Brown

445. “Lykos may be gone. Eo may be silent. Mustang a world away. And the Sons on the brink of extinction. But I feel my soul trickling back into me as I realize I am finally home.”

— Pierce Brown

446. “I’ve given Sevro the dregs to command because I know they might be the only people he’ll ever like. At first he ignores them. Then slowly, I begin noticing that more unearthly howls fill the night than before.”

— Pierce Brown

447. “Wisdom is found in the heart not the head.”

— Pierce Brown

448. “A lo largo de la guerra, del espacio y de este maldito desfile, he viajado para volver a encontrarla, a mi vida, mi amor, mi hogar.”

— Pierce Brown

449. “You and I keep looking for light in the darkness, expecting it to appear. But it already has.” I touch his shoulder. “We’re it, boyo. Broken and cracked and stupid as we are, we’re the light, and we’re spreading.”

— Pierce Brown

450. “You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules.”

— Pierce Brown