Quotes

Each short story begins with a quote. This is that.

This is by far the most definitive list of finished work, but exists primarily as a quote-repository so that I know where ones I've used and which ones I haven't.

The Course Books:

These are the short stories from the established story-lists for the Course Books.

The Path to Ascension

1. The Wings of a Dragon: “It is said that the best and fastest way to deal with someone who is suicidal is to start actively trying to kill them. Self-preservation is a tough habit to kick, and like any addiction the withdrawal symptoms can be deadly if not treated properly. It is one thing to take a cowardly jump off a cliff and end it all. In that situation you have total control of where and, more or less, when you are going to die. But in a situation where you are being attacked or chased, that basic fight-or-flight survival instinct kicks in, and forces the would-be statistic to re-think their decision and, more often than not, realize they really do want to live.”
2. Through the Night: “We live, we die, we fight. Life is a journey, the destination is what you make of yours.”
3. Disarming: “No, cut the red wire!”
4. Wildfire Emerges: “Like a storm of swords, fire shall rain down upon my enemies.”
5. Ulysses Last Stand: “Stand like a stone wall; never give up, never surrender. Show your enemies what it means to be Gung Ho.”
6. The Sun Also Rises: “As the sun sets, it also rises.”
7. Virus: “There’s lots of time like the present.”
8. The Truth Finally Revealed: “Truth is the most powerful weapon known to man. It’s so powerful that it has been outlawed, kept out of the public’s hands. It’s time to take it back.”
9. Clouds Last Run: “De opresso Letum, to free from death.”
10. Last Stand, Tora, Tora, Tora: “With good aim and careful re-loading, one man with a shotgun can do the work of many.” - Mathew Seaman
11. The Slayer Dragons: “Speed and fire are always a deadly combination.”
12. Return of the Dragon: “Looking back, I’d have to say my only regret was not running faster.”
13. The Dark Lord Nimi: “Destiny, fate, chance, they’re all just excuses people use for taking credit for their victories, and not their failures. It’s the things we do that make us who we are.”
14. The Reunion of the Eighth Power: “One soldier isn’t good enough, eight soldiers aren’t good enough. An army of one dies alone. To deserve victory, we must combine so that each soldier has the power of eight. We will be eight together, to the Eighth Power.”
15. Revival: “As a phoenix rises from the ashes of defeat, so too shall you rise to victory.”
16. The Red Tiger: “The strength of a tiger is like a locomotive. Its flesh is as armor plates, its sinews are steel springs. Truly, this is power to be respected.”
17. The New Recruit: “I have a theory about why you lost the fight…”
18. The Path to Ascension(Story): “Heaven to Ocean, Ocean to Earth, Earth back to Heaven.”

The Road to War

1. The Eye of a Dragon: “Hope is a waking dream.” – Aristotle
2. Tale of a Gun: “Know, think, choose, do.” - Orson Scott Card
3. First Stand: “It is difficult to fight against anger, for a man will buy vengeance with his soul.” – Heraclitus, 500 B.C.
4. Counter Strike: “Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked up by jet engines.” – John Benfield
5. Flight of the Takahe: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” - Lord Kelvin, 1892
6. Against the Wind: “If at first you don’t succeed, you obviously haven’t used enough ducttape.”
7. Dragoon Lancers: Wrath of the Lancer's Light: “If we should not live to see another sunrise, let them say this over the pyre: they died as Dragoon Lancers, their faces to the fire.” – Dragoon Lancer’s Creed
8. CTRL+Z: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do yesterday.” – Anonymous
9. Flash Point: “Fire in the hole.” – Anonymous EOD officer
10. Retrospectus: “Hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is full of clichés.”
11. Line in the Sand: “Sometimes it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
12. Point of the Spear: “I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
13. Marigold: “So when your back’s up against the wall and theirs no tomorrow, just take one day at a time and remember: the bigger they are, etc.” – Jack O’Neil
14. Falling Dragon: “Raid ye not the dragon’s lair, for ye are juicy, and taste good with ketchup.”
15. The Road to War(Story): “Do not go quietly into the night. Do not disappear without a fight. Rage, rage against the dying of the Light.” - Dylan Thomas

The Concourse to Victory

1. The Breath of a Dragon: “A weak man has doubts before a decision, a strong man has them afterwards.” – Karl Kraus
2. First Impressions: “The only thing that lasts longer than a friend's love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better.” – Randy K. Milholland
3. Beachhead: “All right, let’s go get ‘em.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
4. Flying Lessons: “The best cure for frustration is silence.” – Emily
5. The Liger, the Sorceress, and… the Refrigerator?: “There are some problems violence can’t solve. For everything else, there’s Gudersnipe.” – Gudersnipe Foundation Slogan.
6. Falling Sky: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” – Chicken Little.
7. Sunset: “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch-black.” – Despair, Inc.
8. Clause: “If you strap enough thrust onto a brick, it will soar like an eagle. If you strap enough thrust onto an eagle, it will soar like Daemon Wing.” – Hunter Jusenkyou
9. Catastrophe: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
10. Fan Fiction: “He was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.” – Ted Morgan
11. Daylight: “The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with courage.” – Thucydides
12. Forbidden: “It’s basic logic, it wouldn’t be ‘forbidden’ unless there was something totally awesome inside!” – Hunter Jusenkyou
13. Dusk: “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” – Andre Gide
14. Forgotten: “If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.” – Bill Lyon
15. The Tiger's Eye: “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
16. Cavalry: “People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.” – Anne Tyler.
17. Absolution: “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” - Georges Clemenceau
18. The Concourse to Victory(Story): “Defeated warriors go to war and try to win; victorious warriors win first and then go to war; personally, I just blow things up.” – Hunter Jusenkyou, The Science of War.

The Inclination to Destiny

• The Claw of a Dragon: “Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.” – Heraclitus
• The Inclination to Destiny(Story): “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.” – Hunter S. Thompson

The Byway to Freedom

• The Voice of a Dragon: “An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.” – Russell Baker
• The Byway to Freedom(Story): “Here is the price of freedom: Your every drop of courage, ounce of pain, pint of blood. Paid in advance.” – Andromeda

Other Course Books stories and quotes

The story-lists for the final two books of the series have not yet been finalized, do not assume anything based on this list or the order.

• Tsubasa Kyoku: “This is just a test right? You’re checking to make sure I read the safety manual. All right, I admit it, I didn’t read it, thought it was stupid.” – Andromeda
• The Box: “Don’t use drugs, drugs are bad. Unless they are performance-enhancing drugs; then, they’re super-win.” – Douglas Roffel
• Avenger: “The sin of Los Alamos wasn’t that they created the atomic bomb, but that they enjoyed it.” – George Dryson.
• Masks: “Peace, through superior firepower.” – Gudersnipe Foundation Advertising Dept.
• Storm: “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” – George Carlin
• The Hunted: “The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.” – Ayn Rand
• Half the Fun: “No one traveling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.” - Thorstein Veblen
• True Self: “In life we don’t get what we want, we get in life what we are. If we want more we have to be able to be more, in order to be more you have to face rejection.” – Farrah Gray
• Princess Megami: “With good aim and careful reloading, one brave man with a shotgun can do the work of many.” – Mathew Seamen
• Responsibility: “There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.” – Josh Billings
• Not Hunting: “Hunting implies the possibility of failure. We go killing.” – Jason Bur’I
• Infinity: “Courage is a seed, planted within every heart, only when nurtured can it flower and shelter us from our fears. Will is a strength of the heart, the power that feeds all others. But fate is illusive, fate is a hunter.” – Cindy Kyte.
• Obsession:
• Full Circle: “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” – Arthur C. Clarke
• Heart of the Journey: “Fairy tales don't tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” – G. K. Chesterton
• Joshua: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
• Aspect of Death: “Hundreds of years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove... But the world may be different because I did something so bafflingly crazy that my ruins become a tourist attraction.” – Despair, Inc.
• Ability: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.” – Samuel Clemmons
• Backfire: “I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself.” – Edith Sitwell
• Priorities: “Because it is there.” – George Mallory
• Presence: “In 1952, at the Nevada Test Site, Ted Taylor added to his already considerable reputation by holding up a small parabolic mirror and lighting a cigarette with an atomic bomb.” – George Dyson, Project Orion
• Still Life: “There is an island of opportunity in the middle of every difficulty. Miss that, though, and you're pretty much doomed.” – Despair, Inc.
• Chain Reaction: “It is impossible to not believe in God, and hate him at the same time.” – Anonymous
• Heritage: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” — Douglas Adams.
• Debt: “If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.” – Despair, Inc.
• The Strange Matter Sword: “We are men of action, lies do not become us.” – Count Tyrone Rugen
• Never: “We are all failures at least, all the best of us are.” – J. M. Barrie
• The Other Half: “Peristeronic – of or pertaining to pigeons.” – American Heritage Dictionary
• Make Truth: “They say that in a mirror, hides the true world. A world with no secrets, no lies, and hardly any emotion, it’s a world we all secretly fear.” - Anonymous
• False Gods: “And they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.”” – Mark 5:12
• Decisive Action: “When the winds of change blow hard enough, the most trivial of things can turn into deadly projectiles” – Despair, Inc.
• Fall of the Pheonix: “Fire at will! …Which ones Will?” – Anonymous
• Dragon's Teeth: “Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.” – Benjamin Franklin
• Fade Out: “Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.” – George Edward Woodberry
• Fade In: “The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.” – Robert Heinlein
• Jason: “Let him who desires peace prepare for war.” – Flavius Vegetius Renatus
• Quorum: No quote yet.
• Lily: “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung
• First Sight: “He that plants trees loves others beside himself.” – Dr. Thomas Fuller
• The Trinity Alternative: No quote yet.
• Turn: No quote yet.

Other Short Stories

These are other completed short stories and their quotes.

The Furthest Star

The Furthest Star is a collection of short stories specifically focusing on the Saratoga's first mission.

• The Furthest Star(Story): “Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. Thank you.” – John F Kennedy.
• New Ground: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
• Velocity: “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” – Sir Isaac Newton
• Mistakes: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Sir Winston Churchill
• Singularity: "Failure is not an option; it comes bundled in the software." – Anonymous
• Friends: “There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” – Douglas Adams

The Fossa Cycle

The Fossa Books is a series of three books that come before the Course Books.

• The Birth of Hope: No quote yet.
• The Third Ones: “Every great journey and adventure that has ever been undertaken throughout all the histories has always shared one key thing in common: each began with a single step.” – Author of the Gust.
• Kime the Great: “Plan like you’re going to live forever, live like today is your last.” – James Dean
• Carry on, Carry Forward: “I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” – Charles Lindbergh
• Katherine the Average: “The tallest blade of grass is the first cut down by the lawnmower.” – Despair, Inc.
• Dragon: No quote yet.
• The Hidden History of the Gudersnipe Foundation: “What is the difference between Laytami Gudersnipe and God? God doesn’t think he’s Laytami Gudersnipe.”
• Naming Conventions: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”- Sir Winston Churchill

Antelope Books

In the Antelope Cycle, each chapter has a quote.

Author of the Gust

1. “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.” - "Wayne Gretzky"
2. “Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, but only by a little.”
3. “A goal without a plan is a wish.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
4. “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” - Dorothy Bernard
5. “Life is a long lesson in humility.” - James M. Barrie
6. “The truest measure of a society is how it treats its elderly, its pets, and its prisoners.” - Andromeda
7. “Let us fly, let us soar, let us climb to the heavens that the God himself might envy us!”
8. “The thing that is difficult is giving up on being perfect, and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” - Anna Quindlen
9. “When the chips are down and all the cards are on the table, what is it that makes us who we are?”

Scion of the Storm

1. “The winds of life are fickle; you’ll be flying high one minute, then dashed upon the rocks the next. All that maters is what you do in the time between.” – Anonymous.
2. “Doubt whom you will, but never yourself." - Christine Bovee
3. “Truth: the most powerful weapon known to life-kind. Able to destroy entire countries, realities, and preconceptions. Outlawed by all governments everywhere, possession is usually punishable by death.”
4. “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” – Louis Pasteur
5. “Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.” – Carl Sandburg
6. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” - Sun-tzu The Art of War
7. "Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." - Alan Dean Foster
8. “You can’t outrun Death forever, but you can make him work for it.” – Andromeda
9. "Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it." - Lois McMaster Bujold

Herald of the Calm

1. “A coward turns away, but a brave man's choice is danger.” – Euripides
2. “The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.” – Publilius Syrus
3. “Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.”- Cicero
4. “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
5. "A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory." - Arthur Golden
6. “When the winds of change blow hard enough, the most trivial of things can turn into deadly projectiles.” – Despair, Inc.
7. “I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.” – Diane Frolov
8. “The cake is a lie.” – Portal