Matthew Woodring Stover Quotes

Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.-Vergere

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

No lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.Now he begins to understand: because pain is a god—he has been in the grip of this cruel god ever since Anakin’s death. But it is also a teacher, and a bridge. It can be a slave master, and break you—and it can be the power that makes you unbreakable. It is all these things, and more.At the same time.What it is depends on who you are.But who am I? he wonders. I’ve been running like Dad—like Anakin. I think they stopped, though; I think Dad was strong enough to turn back and face it, to use the pain to make himself stronger, like Mom and Uncle Luke. Anakin did, too, at the end. Am I that strong?There’s only one way to find out.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

The hope crashes into reality and people get hurt.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Every time a horse let you up onto its back, it’s giving you its life. Every time.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Darkness is a knife that peels away the rind of what you think you know about yourself. The shades of your pretenses, the tones of your illusions, the layers of deception that glaze your life into the colors that tint your world–all mean nothing in the darkness. No one can see them, not even you.Darkness hides everything except who you really are

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

His agony somehow became an invisible hand, stretching out through the Force, a hand that found her, far away, alone in her apartment in the dark, a hand that felt the silken softness of her skin and the sleek coils of her hair, a hand that dissolved into a field of pure energy, of pure feeling that reached inside her—And now he felt her, really felt her in the Force, as though she could have been some kind of Jedi, too, but more than that: he felt a bond, a connection, deeper and more intimate than he’d ever had before with anyone, even Obi-Wan; for a precious eternal instant he was her … he was the beat of her heart and he was the motion of her lips and he was her soft words as though she spoke a prayer to the stars—

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

I believe in justice, as long as I'm holding a knife at the throat of the judge.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

And so, here at the end of days, you are as you’ve always been. Willing to die. Not willing to quit

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time.One is mortal.They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless.They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers.They each die fighting the blind god.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them--but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

... Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.Two is enough.Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover