Mercedes Lackey Quotes

The great love is gone. There are still little loves - friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no longer sit by the fireplace of a palace? Will you deny yourself to those who reach out to you in hopes of warming themselves at your hearthfire?

~ Mercedes Lackey

To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and one allow himself to be walked on.--Shin'a'in saying

~ Mercedes Lackey

Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.

~ Mercedes Lackey

There’s no such thing as `one, true way’; the only answers worth having are the ones you find for yourself; leave the world better than you found it. Love, freedom, and the chance to do some good — they’re the things worth living and dying for, and if you aren’t willing to die for the things worth living for, you might as well turn in your membership in the human race.

~ Mercedes Lackey

I'm not out to disturb anybody's faith. I happen to be happy and comfortable with a belief system that has a dual deity and operates on a lunar schedule. It suits my needs. If you happen to be happy and comfortable with a belief system that features a single masculine deity and operates on a solar schedule, fine. I don't give a fat damn. What matters is what you do, not who's name you do it in.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Give your enemy a face, If he is human, do not dehumanize him. Know him and know why he is your enemy. If your enemy is within you, understand what it is and why you are afraid. Put a face on your fear. When you understand it, and it is no longer vague and shapeless, you will find that your fear is no longer so formidable.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Some must be warriors, that others may live in peace.

~ Mercedes Lackey

The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.

~ Mercedes Lackey

There’s a saying in Hardorn,” she continued. “‘You shouldn’t attempt to teach a goat to sing. It will waste your time, hurt your ears, and annoy the goat.’ I can say without fear of contradiction that the goat is getting annoyed.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me.

~ Mercedes Lackey

This I think I have learned: where there is love, the form does not matter, and the gods are pleased. This I have observed: what occurs in nature, comes by the hand of nature, and if the gods did not approve, it would not be there~ Moondance k'Treva (Magic's Pawn)

~ Mercedes Lackey

You marry who you think your beloved is, and then discover who they really are over the years. It’s that discovery that makes a marriage work.

~ Mercedes Lackey

In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Sometimes, it seemed, the business of a Witch or a Godmother was not so much using magic as knowing when not to use it.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Keth, power brings with it the need to make moral judgments; history proves that. You have no choice but to make those decisions.

~ Mercedes Lackey

(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world--because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded and in the end all was made

~ Mercedes Lackey

You are human and mortal, we are the sum of our weak moments and our strong.

~ Mercedes Lackey

I have no place in my life for someone who is sure he can do everything.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Teach what you know, regardless of when you have learned it -- teach what you learned yesterday sagely, as if you have known it all your life, and teach what you have known for decades with enthusiasm, as if you learned it only yesterday.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Ree- Grey barked into the icy silence. Lax!The word spat so unexpectedly into her ear had precisely the effect Grey must have intended. It shocked Nan for a split second into a state of not-thinking, just being-Suddenly, all in an instant she and Neville were one.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Why, you mean you didn't get abducted and dragged across country purely to make us a story for us to chew over endlessly? asked Pip, tossing his shock of tow-colored hair indignantly. The nerve!

~ Mercedes Lackey

I think I know why you never married, Sarah.Well, and I reckoned if I wanted something that'd come and go as he pleased, take me for granted, and ignore me when he chose, I'd get a cat. And if I wanted something I'd always have to be picking up after, getting into trouble, but slavishly devoted, I'd get a dog.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Kethry had once described summoning as being “like balancing on a rooftree while screaming an epic poem in a foreign language at the top of your lungs.

~ Mercedes Lackey

...for a country whose people ceased to believe in magic soon lost much of their ability to imagine and dream, and before long, they ceased to believe--or hope-- for anything.

~ Mercedes Lackey

It's just as easy to be lonely in a city as out in the wilderness. Easier, really. It's harder to get to know someone when you meet in a crowded place. People can freely ignore you in the city; they can assume they don't have any responsibility for you. When there are fewer people, (...) they begin assuming some kind of responsibility, simply because you naturally do the same.

~ Mercedes Lackey

If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.

~ Mercedes Lackey

When you want something done, you ask a man. When you want it done quietly and without any fuss, you ask a woman.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Certainly no one has ever died of an unrequited passion—it's usually the ones that are requited that get people in trouble.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Adventure, yeah. I guess that's what you call it when everybody comes back alive.

~ Mercedes Lackey

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.

~ Mercedes Lackey

[Harrier] locked eyes with Zanattar. He couldn't remember another time in his life when he'd been this angry and hadn't hit something.

~ Mercedes Lackey

She would never truly be her own woman if she allowed fear and old memories to dictate where she would or would not go.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Inexperience can be overcome, ignorance can be enlightened, but prejudice will destroy you.

~ Mercedes Lackey

We're none of us quite so sure of our place in the world that we can't be rocked off our feet by bad times. It's the getting back up again that counts. Not that you fall, but getting back up again counts for more in the long run.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Not forgiving someone is like not pulling a thorn out of your foot just because you weren't the one to put it there.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Once the blinders are off, it's rather hard to go back to seeing things the way you used to.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Nevertheless, now that I have met you, I know that all that I am, and all that I have, could not match what you are worth.

~ Mercedes Lackey

We believe that all those who are served should also spend time serving.

~ Mercedes Lackey

Words and love together can more often achieve what magic cannot.

~ Mercedes Lackey