Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
28 quotes
"I wish but to share your gifts as a young boy on his birthday would excitedly rip open his packages to the view of others."
"Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning."
"The gear teeth of his mind, the cogs of the brain’s machinery that propelled his thoughts, were grinding to a halt, too long forced to fight against the friction of agony without the aid of hope, the lubricant for the soul."
"It remains for you to save one before saving others, to lead one before leading others."
"Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died."
"Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans."
"If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger."
"Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die."
"A silence overtook the odd family in their odd surroundings as loss became the mockery of the moment, and they were caught up in the emotional release that is common in a theater audience after the sudden ending of a tragic movie; the curtain closes and the people are still in their seats, numb and sighing their way back into reality."
"I can’t tell you what’s in all of God’s plans, but I do know part of them. He empowers you with reason and will. Those are your strengths. That’s what gives you the chance to be great in his sight. He gave you a mind and codes to live by so you could be in charge of your own actions."
"Some people get what they want because they grab the power and swing it, and some people don’t."
"Politics is all about dividing up the power. Washington D.C. likes to talk about spreading the wealth, but never spreading the power."
"Seek until there is no hope and then seek further. Seek without end. Trudge on without tiring and without fear and without disheartenment. Trudge on, for it is within you to fight any enemy. It is who you are. It is your past and your present and your future. You will not quit. You cannot quit. Your breath is your courage, and as you breathe, so must you hope or you are already dead."
"If you decide to take somebody on, don’t look behind you, because there won’t be anybody there. You’ll be all alone."
"Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future."
"We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world."
"I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so."
"Evil won’t leave you alone until you take a stand or until you’re dead."
"Evil stinks and it doesn’t disappear just because you want it to. You can still smell it with your eyes closed."
"Men who have been in war have a different attitude about being wronged."
"He had no ability to give up. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to quit, he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. It never had been."
"Surviving is about need. Living is about want."
"Gifford Ulrich didn’t know the distance from despair to hope, but he knew hope didn’t sleep in alleys."
"A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in."
"Fear was the hand of the devil holding a scalding hot branding iron and touching your brain and your stomach and yelling at you to run with leaden feet."