Top 80 Tad Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”

— Tad Williams

2. “Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.”

— Tad Williams

3. “The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.”

— Tad Williams

4. “He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.”

— Tad Williams

5. “Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.”

— Tad Williams

6. “A well-aimed spear is worth three.”

— Tad Williams

7. “He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you’d never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you’d never really had.”

— Tad Williams

8. “Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”

— Tad Williams

9. “Tangaloor, fire-bright Flame-foot, farthest walker Your hunter speaks In need he walks In need, but never in fear.”

— Tad Williams

10. “People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?”

— Tad Williams

11. “The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.”

— Tad Williams

12. “You are only a prisoner when you surrender.”

— Tad Williams

13. “Weak dogs become bones for other, stronger dogs.”

— Tad Williams

14. “We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.”

— Tad Williams

15. “You have to go down before you can come out – that’s how these things always work.”

— Tad Williams

16. “Every man is the hero of his own song.”

— Tad Williams

17. “Dying men think of funny things-and that’s what we all are here, aren’t we? Dying men.”

— Tad Williams

18. “The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst.”

— Tad Williams

19. “We survive. But when survival is the only goal, what do the survivors become? This.”

— Tad Williams

20. “Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that’s my philosophy.”

— Tad Williams

21. “It’s amazing the stupid things I say sometimes. I mean, you could start an entire branch of scientific research about the stuff I say that gets proved wrong while I’m still busy saying it.”

— Tad Williams

22. “Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific!”

— Tad Williams

23. “Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.”

— Tad Williams

24. “I’m tired of being lost and I’m tired of dying, so I’m going to try something different this time.”

— Tad Williams

25. “Honor is the only really good disguise for an occasional act of dishonor.”

— Tad Williams

26. “Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.”

— Tad Williams

27. “Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.”

— Tad Williams

28. “COME AWAY, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you – yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short.”

— Tad Williams

29. “When you were old, did your memories crowd out your other thoughts? Or did you lose them – your childhood, your hated enemies, your friends?”

— Tad Williams

30. “Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build – but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?”

— Tad Williams

31. “Love. Tired old jokes aside, a real, powerful love does have one thing in common with Hell itself: it burns everything else out of you.”

— Tad Williams

32. “I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.”

— Tad Williams

33. “If your enemy comes to speak bearing a sword, open your door to him and speak, but keep your own sword at hand. If he comes to you empty-handed, greet him the same way. But if he comes to you bearing gifts, stand on your walls and cast stones down on him.”

— Tad Williams

34. “I’m pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I’ll purr at you, but I’ll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you’d ignored me.”

— Tad Williams

35. “She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.”

— Tad Williams

36. “Make Philosophy your evening guest, but do not let her stay the night.”

— Tad Williams

37. “As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.”

— Tad Williams

38. “We call darkness our friend, but when the elders tell us stories of the Garden, they talk of the holy, unending light that was there. How did shadows become our only dwelling?”

— Tad Williams

39. “Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That’s what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions – if there is any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations.”

— Tad Williams

40. “As he slipped away he heard his own cradled heartbeat, muffled though it was in the tickling wool of exhaustion.”

— Tad Williams

41. “But remember this lesson, Simon, one fit for kings... or the sons of kings. Nothing is without cost. There is a price to all power, and it is not always obvious.”

— Tad Williams

42. “I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.”

— Tad Williams

43. “Do you listen to the wolves, Seoman?” Jiriki asked. “It’s hard n-not to.” “They sing such fierce songs.” The Sitha shook his head. “They are like your mortal kind. They sing of where they have been, and what they have seen and scented. They tell each other where the elk are running, and who has taken whom to mate, but mostly they are merely crying ‘I am! Here I am!’”

— Tad Williams

44. “But our own selves are like pearls, created by layer after layer of present laid over past until the original thing is completely hidden.”

— Tad Williams

45. “A wolf is clever-clever-clever, and they are as faithful as a debt unpaid.”

— Tad Williams

46. “A man whose wisdom is true does not sit in waiting for the world to come at him piece by piece for proving its existence!”

— Tad Williams

47. “That is the problem with rumors,” said Avin Brone. “It is very hard to prove that things are not true – much more difficult than proving they are.”

— Tad Williams

48. “Though talent is wonderful, dance is 80% work and 20% talent.”

— Tad Williams

49. “What, you don’t have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did.”

— Tad Williams

50. “You dog!” she said, so loud that half the crowded tavern turned to watch. “A few days past the walls of the inner keep and you think your pizzle has turned to solid silver? At least when Nevin Hewney falls asleep on top of a girl, drooling and farting and limp as custard, he doesn’t pretend he’s done her a favor.”

— Tad Williams