Top 30 Sam Sykes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Crime and religion are the only two things that people are willing to both die for and kill over.”

— Sam Sykes

2. “Pain has a way of dragging time out. You can lose hours, days, years of your life to it, either in fear of it or waiting for it to stop.”

— Sam Sykes

3. “Regardless, my most horrific discovery has been that society is nothing more than a series of carefully calculated choices based solely around economics.”

— Sam Sykes

4. “Hold that thought. This sounds like the kind of conversation I’ll need pants for.” It.”

— Sam Sykes

5. “Don’t not ever stop not writing nothing.”

— Sam Sykes

6. “The best defense to inquiry was semi-coherent rants and accusations.”

— Sam Sykes

7. “To them, suffering came from neither loss nor tragedy, but from desire and denial. To them, suffering was no famine or drought. Suffering was a belly not yet full to bursting, a mouth that drank water instead of wine. To them, suffering was something temporary, to be overcome, to be put aside and placed on a mantel with all their other things made of metal.”

— Sam Sykes

8. “But courage was a flower, something that blossomed and wilted swiftly. And Gariath was a cold snap in winter.”

— Sam Sykes

9. “The meaning, Captain,” the Quill said softly, “is that death does not stop life.”

— Sam Sykes

10. “There are others, but the end result is that most Vagrants showing up where you live will ruin your day. Not me, of course. A girl like me tends to ruin your whole week.”

— Sam Sykes

11. “See, to appreciate a woman you have to appreciate a woman’s right to change. And to appreciate a woman’s right to change, you have to realize that she’ll do it with maddening frequency, usually just to confuse you so that you’ll never see her coming when she decides to rip your throat out and drink your blood.”

— Sam Sykes

12. “The song of lightning followed me, an angry, screeching verse torn from twenty ragged throats.”

— Sam Sykes

13. “How can you be so sure?” Lenk asked. “That there’s no plan?” “Because,” Mocca said as he eyed the bottle, “I can’t imagine any God would be boring enough to want to know how everything ends.”

— Sam Sykes

14. “But you don’t get to live through as many battles as Courageous had without being a practical man. And a practical man doesn’t have ethics; he has jobs. And somehow, they’ve got to get done.”

— Sam Sykes

15. “Come, squib, sit with Kudj. Engage in beautifully awkward hospitality.” He reached into the pot with a large finger and stirred whatever was inside. “Stew not hot. Fire not big enough. Squib is welcome to some anyway.”

— Sam Sykes

16. “Professionals knew that the most dangerous men in the world were accountants.”

— Sam Sykes

17. “Half-drunken poetry is the most honest kind of poetry. Too slurred to be eloquent, not slurred enough to be witless.”

— Sam Sykes

18. “No one ever gets the death they want,” I replied. “Just the one they deserve.”

— Sam Sykes

19. “People were noisome, demanding, judgmental. Books gave everything and asked nothing more than to be taken care of.”

— Sam Sykes

20. “Belief doesn’t exist. Or it doesn’t matter. Whichever. There is only what is known and what is unknown, a question and an answer. Belief is something that people use to excuse themselves when they give up finding it.”

— Sam Sykes

21. “While violence was almost certainly the solution, Lenk knew he needed to apply it selectively.”

— Sam Sykes

22. “Courageous read a lot of books. That’s probably why he was so angry all the time.”

— Sam Sykes

23. “Books gave everything and asked nothing more than to be taken care of.”

— Sam Sykes

24. “Sometimes, it was real nice just being with someone who hurt like you did.”

— Sam Sykes

25. “If you’re lucky, you meet a lot of people you like enough to touch them. If you’re really lucky, you meet a few who you like enough to let them touch you back. But if you’re very luck, you meet that one person who touches you in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing up a little straighter, like you’re breathing a little clearer, like you were walking hunched over your whole life and you didn’t even know it.”

— Sam Sykes

26. “The first lie we’re ever told is that we’re better than beasts.”

— Sam Sykes

27. “Mister Lenk,’ he forced through his teeth, ‘you are by far the most disgusting. ’ Lenk weighed the pouch in his hand, hearing the jingle of coins within. Nodding, he tucked it into his own belt. ‘That’s why I’m the leader.”

— Sam Sykes

28. “People are wounds. They cut and they hurt and they bleed. Some hurt for a little while and go away. Some don’t stop hurting until you make them.”

— Sam Sykes

29. “The loudest sound in the world is a man of faith beginning to doubt. And over it, I couldn’t hear anything else.”

— Sam Sykes

30. “That hadn’t gone well. Not that I had expected it to go better – nothing is ever improved with the addition of tentacles, after all.”

— Sam Sykes

31. “In Liette’s case, those words were probably something like, If it were possible to make love to books, I would.”

— Sam Sykes

32. “She always preferred paper to people. People were noisome, demanding, judgmental. Books gave everything and asked nothing more than to be taken care of. I found her priorities charming.”

— Sam Sykes

33. “Feathers glittering the color of amethyst against the dying light of the day, long tails trailing in the breeze like kites, wings shimmering with every beat. They looked so oblivious to their majesty, like flying and painting the sky with purple was just something they did, rather than something that made my knees shake.”

— Sam Sykes