Quotes by "Dean F. Wilson"

When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader. Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own. With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser. What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.

The candles were adored and worshipped like idols, for, after all, they invoked the gods of light.

She might've had the skill to get them out of the Hold, but God knew how she'd fare across the desert of Altadas. And God wasn't telling.

From this vantage point, Jacob noticed the distinctive emblem of the Resistance on a patch sewn onto the right shoulder of Rommond’s uniform. It showed a white equilateral triangle with two lines horizontally through it, all upon a royal blue field. What it meant was the subject of some discussion, but some thought it represented an uprising that pierced the ceiling of Hell and the floor of Heaven, as if to say they would resist not only the Devil, but God too.

It was a long walk back to civilisation. Death was just a stroll away.

Nox didn’t say a word. He waited, counting the seconds in his mind. Sometimes you counted bullets and sometimes you counted time. Either one could kill you.

The Pure. It was all a fairy tale, something to give people hope. Real hope. Without it, they mightn't have held out for so long. They might've stopped fighting altogether. Yeah, just a fairy tale. There were no such things as angels, but the demons were very real.

The Hope factory was menacing in the distance, for it was one of the few buildings that somehow managed to present itself through the smog. Its hulking form consumed almost all of the horizon, and its many pistons, pillars, chimneys and flumes ate into the heavens. For the parts of the sky it could not reach, those towers sent up endless streams of smoke, and this smoke devoured the natural clouds and left an unnatural haze in the heavens. The factory was a greedy mass of brick, a ravenous form of iron. As much as it gobbled up all the landscape, it threatened that it might eat the onlookers too.

If the Regime had a factory producing Hope, the Resistance had a factory producing the tools of despair.

Be idealistic about the future, be realistic about the present, and never forget the lessons of the past.

Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another.

We can bet on one thing in our flight, and that's that the Regime will be looking for us. Their maw is likely here in the west, where they know we're strongest. If you linger near the mouth of a predator, you make yourself an easy dish. Sometimes you're safer beneath the belly of the beast.

Let me warn you again, in case your ghost ever tries to condemn me.

Silence fell with night, but Jacob couldn't entirely silence his racing mind, nor speed it up to the finish line.

They continued this deadly dance across the battlefield, played to the music of gunfire, which rattled them as much as it rattled the hulls of almost every landship in sight, and almost every one they couldn't turn quickly enough to see. Then the music took a bullet of its own, for Jacob no longer heard the song of Andil’s gun.

But then the war didn't always harden you on the outside. The desert did that. The war crisped you up within.

She looked at her right hand, where the index finger was cut to a stump. Some said she lost it in an accident, when she was playing soldier with a live grenade. Others said she was taught a lesson by the law, and they took her trigger finger to make her keep on learning. Those were the lessons the Coilhunter liked. Why, he was quite the teacher himself.

That was the thing about bad dreams in the Wild North. You still had them when you woke up.

The truth of it was that time was healing his outer wounds, but time with Jacob was healing the ones inside.

They continued across the seemingly endless sands, watering every grain with their sweat, anointing every granule with their strain. In the hourglass of time the sands continued to shift, and they couldn't find their way outside the glass. Their shadows struggled with them, hauling and heaving, dropping with them, and clambering up with them, and reminding them constantly that otherwise they were alone.