Pierce Brown

“Pity is not forgiveness, nor is gratitude absolution.”

“Every high school I went to, I joined in the middle of the year, so sports helped. But you see a lot of bullies when you move to eight states, I'll say that.”

“He always thinks because I'm reading, I'm not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.”

“I think girls have a harder time than guys do if you're switching schools. Guys don't get picked on as long as you're OK in sports.”

“The Golds have everything, yet they demand sacrifices even from their own. This place is sick. This empire broken. It eats its kings, its queens, as hungrily as it does the paupers who mill its earth.”

“Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.”

“Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science - how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here.”

“I've always looked at independent booksellers in a romantic light.”

“She will not come back, but her beauty, her voice, will echo until the end of time. She believed in something beyond herself, and her death gave her voice power it didn’t have in life. She was pure, like your father. We, you and I” — he touches my chest with the back of his index finger — “are dirty. We are made for blood. Rough hands. Dirty hearts. We are lesser creatures in the grand scheme of things, but without us men of war, no one except those of Lykos would hear Eo’s song. Without our rough hands, the dreams of the pure hearts would never be built.”

“When you look at a lot of the military histories, and even modern military history, everyone pretty much refers to each other by nicknames.”

“... You have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.”

“Wisdom is found in the heart not the head.”

“I have been rejected 120 times, probably because I didn't write the right book.”

“Liars make the best promises.”

“Every hero must return home. Starks to Winterfell. Harry to Privet Drive. Luke Skywalker to Tattoine. Katniss to District twelve. The fun is in seeing how they return.”

“War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will com and I won't even see it. ~Darrow”

“I look at him for a moment. Words are a weapon stronger than he knows. And songs are even greater. The words wake the mind. The melody wakes the heart. I come from a people of song and dance. I don’t need him to tell me the power of words. But I smile nonetheless.”

“A lot of times, I faced bullies - or the 'big dogs' at school. What I wanted 'Red Rising' to be is not necessarily an indictment on bullies, but it reflects my experiences and attitudes that I had with bullies growing up.”

“I'm kind of irritated by the Hollywood scene.”

“Friendships take minutes to make, moments to break, years to repair.”