Dan Abnett Quotes

Dan Abnett offers sly, imaginative musings on war, surveillance and truth.

14 quotes

1. Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock.

2. Real truth was out there in the shattered outhabs of Vervun hive. Real truth was waiting and silence, courage and stealth. Real truth was the ability to function in extremes. To fire a cannon and miss and try again. To fix a silver blade to the end of a las-weapon and leap from safety into a shroud of smoke, prepared as you did so to really use that makeshift spear. Real truth was a tiny hole in a man's forehead.

3. If he speaks again without me knowing who he is, I will throw him out of the window. And I won't open it first.

4. Have you noticed we can breathe in here too? Gosh, I wouldn't have picked up on that.

5. That's all you get," said Alpharius, and split him in half. Alpharius sheathed his gladius, and dragged the sabre out of his torso. He tossed it away, and walked through the liter of bodies to where Namatjira was kneeling on the deck. "Please! My lord primarch! Please, I beg you!" Namtjira pleaded, his hands making a desperate namaste. Alpharius drew his boltgun. "Why?" shrieked Namatjira. "Why are you doing this? "For the Emperor," said Alpharius, and pulled the trigger.

6. We pick up the pieces, Donna. Some of them are broken.

7. Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul with the armour of contempt.

8. But my patience isn't limitless... unlike my authority.

9. Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.

10. I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude - we've proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure.

11. In my experience, the heavy-handed, terror-inspiring approach closes as many doors as it smashes open.

12. “He is so… changeable,’ Guilliman says. ‘He is so prone to extremes. Eager to please, quick to take offence. There is no middle to him. He’s so keen to be your best friend, and then, at the slightest perception of an insult, he’s angry with you. Furious. Offended. Like a child.”

13. “are you telling me i can't stay here untill saterday?”

14. “You are walking along the shores of a lake,’ Sindermann said. ‘A boy is drowning. Do you let him drown because he was foolish enough to fall into the water before he had learned to swim? Or do you fish him out, and teach him how to swim?’ Loken shrugged. ‘The latter.’ ‘What if he fights you off as you attempt to save him, because he is afraid of you? Because he doesn’t want to learn how to swim?’ ‘I save him anyway.”