“My Dear Son,I am so very proud of you. Now, as you embark on a new journey, I'd like to share this one piece of advice. Always, always remember that - adversity is not a detour. It is part of the path.You will encounter obstacles. You will make mistakes. Be grateful for both. Your obstacles and mistakes will be your greatest teachers. And the only way to not make mistakes in this life is to do nothing, which is the biggest mistake of all. Your challenges, if you let them, will become your greatest allies. Mountains can crush or raise you, depending on which side of the mountain you choose to stand on. All history bears out that the great, those who have changed the world, have all suffered great challenges. And, more times than not it's precisely those challenges that, in God's time, lead to triumph.Abhor victimhood. Denounce entitlement. Neither are gifts, rather cages to damn the soul. Everyone who has walked this earth is a victim of injustice. Everyone.Most of all, do not be too quick to denounce your sufferings. The difficult road you are called to walk may, in fact be your only path to success.”
―
Richard Paul Evans,
A Winter Dream
“I'd rather live with a thing done poorly than do nothing and always wonder how things could have been.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“The days without difficulty are the days you do not improve.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“I can't imagine a world where the man holding a sword does not have the last say over the man without one.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“Rage is love...twisted in on itself. Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“Life is nothing more than moments in time. To achieve greatness, you have to give up those moments. You have to give your life to your goal.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“He was not the strongest, the quickest, or the most talented, not by any measure. He knew this and knew he could not control this. However, he could control his effort, the work he put in, and there he would not be beaten.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“I’m not asking you to win. That’s not solely in your control,” Aren said. “I’m asking that you fight to win. Anything less is the acceptance of loss and an admission that you deserve it.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“The wars you’ll wage aren’t decided when you fight them. They’re decided before that, by the extent of your effort and the substance of your sacrifices. They are decided by the choices you make every single day. So ask yourself: ‘how powerful do I choose to be?” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“only path to becoming what others cannot is to suffer what others will not.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Perfect Day
“The lie isn’t that we can’t be their equals. The lie is that they were ever anything but our equals.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“And, like that, there was no going back. A Dragon had been called and someone would have to die.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“Let them think me a monster,” the Dragon Queen thought. “I will be a monster, if it means we survive.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“A fighter who will only go into battle when they're at their best fights for pleasure and not principle. The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we'll only defend them in the sun.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.” ― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer
“Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“Life is the soil, our choices and actions the sun and rain, but our dreams are the seeds.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Winter Dream
“I have wondered why it is that our greatest triumphs spring from our greatest extremity and adversity. Perhaps it is because we are so resistant to change, we only move when our seat becomes too hot to occupy.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Winter Dream
“I'd rather live with a thing done poorly than do nothing and always wonder how things could have been.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“The days without difficulty are the days you do not improve.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“I can't imagine a world where the man holding a sword does not have the last say over the man without one.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“Rage is love...twisted in on itself. Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“Life is nothing more than moments in time. To achieve greatness, you have to give up those moments. You have to give your life to your goal.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“He was not the strongest, the quickest, or the most talented, not by any measure. He knew this and knew he could not control this. However, he could control his effort, the work he put in, and there he would not be beaten.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“I’m not asking you to win. That’s not solely in your control,” Aren said. “I’m asking that you fight to win. Anything less is the acceptance of loss and an admission that you deserve it.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“The wars you’ll wage aren’t decided when you fight them. They’re decided before that, by the extent of your effort and the substance of your sacrifices. They are decided by the choices you make every single day. So ask yourself: ‘how powerful do I choose to be?” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“only path to becoming what others cannot is to suffer what others will not.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“. . .and every native has a story of winter – stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? And grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Perfect Day
“The lie isn’t that we can’t be their equals. The lie is that they were ever anything but our equals.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“And, like that, there was no going back. A Dragon had been called and someone would have to die.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“Let them think me a monster,” the Dragon Queen thought. “I will be a monster, if it means we survive.” ― Evan Winter, The Rage of Dragons
“A fighter who will only go into battle when they're at their best fights for pleasure and not principle. The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we'll only defend them in the sun.” ― Evan Winter, The Fires of Vengeance
“There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.” ― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer
“Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“Life is the soil, our choices and actions the sun and rain, but our dreams are the seeds.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Winter Dream
“I have wondered why it is that our greatest triumphs spring from our greatest extremity and adversity. Perhaps it is because we are so resistant to change, we only move when our seat becomes too hot to occupy.” ― Richard Paul Evans, A Winter Dream
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