It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s...

And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Give Compassion: Every day the average person fights epic battles never told just to survive.

Uphill? There’s nothing up the hill,” Colly said, trying desperately to work out where this conversation was going.”As a matter of fact, there is. There’s a bluff about twelve meters high, with a river running below it. The water’s deep, so it’ll be quite safe for you to jump.” In his brief glimpse of the...

Reflections of the battlements shimmered in the deep green moat, casting an image of enduring strength, an image that defied the very siege of time.

Whoa, don’t assume, dude,” Marco said. “My mom always said, when you assume you make an ass of u and me–

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.’ He held out his hand, palm open. ‘Free will has to be taken,’ I said.

Please don’t arrest me.””Listen to me, I’m not going to arrest you, ok? I’m not a cop.””Are you sure?””Am I sure I’m not a cop? yes, I’m sure.””You could be undercover.

The door handle turned. Someone knocked, and a man’s voice called, “Uh, hello?”Valkyrie looked at Skulduggery, looked back at the others, looked at Skulduggery again.”Hello,” Skulduggery said, speaking loudly to be heard over the alarm. “Hi,” said the man. “The door’s locked.””Is it?””Yes.””That’s funny” said Skulduggery. “Hold on a moment.” He reached out, jiggled the...

‘No Country for Old Men’ was epic.

For a shadow, you hit like a sledgehammer!” The words barely escape before something else slams into the base of my skull embedding most of my upper body in the wall and all but removing my head. These things are like Lucy; the disembodied dead who haven’t moved on. I’ve never met others that can...

For every blissful moment you must an anguish meet.

A wounded animal yet bears teeth

In every journey comes a moment… one like no other. And in that moment, you must decide between who you are… and who you want to be.

When you’re lost there’s nowhere to go but forward. One step at a time – and the way will show itself.

It’s almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there’s really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn’t mean there will be a tomorrow.

The wise will admire you. The wishful will envy you. The weak will hate you. This is the reality for those who dare to be epic.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

There are demons within. And they’re the deadliest kind.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing...

In the beginning there was only Darkness.

So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.’Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising,I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!’These staves...

This isn’t the first time I’ve used this, and the test subject showed no signs of impaired cognitive ability.””Who was the test subject?” asked Aurora.”I test everything out on myself before taking it into the field.”She stared at him. “You zapped your own brain?””And it didn’t do me any harm apart from the dizziness and...

We’re authors, too,” Donegan said, “and we’ve been trying to get into the picture-book market. We have this idea for a Where’s Wally type thing, except in ours, you’d have to find the one living person hiding in among all the dismembered corpses while the chainsaw-wielding killer hunts him down. You know, for kids.””We’re going...

What are we going to do when we get into the temple, anyway? Are we going to fight our way through the Necromancers on our own?””No, we’re going to find a way to let our friends in, and we’ll let them fight while we stand by and look smug.””I like that plan.””It has its moments.

You promise?””I cross the place where my heart used to be and wish to be even more deader than I am now.

Darkness will always be…its own master…

Jesus didn’t die on the cross so we can do something epic. He died so we can have a relationship with an epic God who moves in epic ways!

In this life at least,Our fate is rarely epic.Maybe just as well,Impervious heroes we are not…

I have one dream: I want to get my jet pilot license, and take my jet to 40 000 feet, look down, and realise how small we are. Not for the kick of the G’s but just to get the feeling of just for once flying above humanity.

In fairy tales the evil characters disappear or die, in reality, evil spreads while you wait for your hero on a horse, only to realise the sword to save yourself was always in your hand…

Beauty to beguile, spies to ensnare, and gold, always gold, to tempt, to trap, to control.

Splendor was the decree of the day.

I’m a little bit naked, but that’s okay.

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?

Small men command the letter of the law. Great men serve its spirit. For the spirit of the law is justice… and justice is the spirit of God.

So each one of you agrees to disagree with whatever the other one agrees with, but if you both disagree with the same thing, aren’t you really in agreement?

Confidence don’t mean jack shit in the real world, sis,” she once said. I feel myself finding the courage to trust those words more and more with every twist of the knife. Coincidentally, last Tuesday afternoon I was involuntarily exposed to the punch line of an old wise tale that goes something like: “There’s beauty...

Di gran furore si pregna il suo scheletro,bagliori saettano, uscendo e rientrandoda essa come rincorsi durante una fuga.Sembra un dio del cielo, pieno di boria,quando ai mortali si appresta a elargiredoni che celano invero soltanto inganni.Alza l’avambraccio, contrae il bicipite,rilucono nei sui occhi di ghiaccio le luciornate dai lapislazzuli. Secco il rilascio.Un potente boato squassa...

As it ‘appens, I am Arthur’s right-hand man,” said Suzy. “Or left-hand girl, I can’t remember where I stood last time. Anyhow, me and Arthur is like two fingers of a gauntlet. Or at least the thumb and the little finger. I mean, I’m his top General, and all. So if I say you’re in,...

His stories were not always new, but there was in the telling of them a special kind of magic. His voice could roll like thunder or hush down into a zepherlike whisper. He could imitate the voices of a dozen men at once; whistle so like a bird that the birds themselves would come to...

I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer…I do know Celtic things (many in...

There was a feeling on the air like the eve of the end of the world.

Hurricanes couldn’t remove you from my mind. You’re my world and I’m incapable of not loving you.

Whether or not the fame of Gilgamesh of Uruk had reached the Aegean – and the idea is attractive – there can be no doubt that it was as great as that of any other hero. In time his name became so much a household word that jokes and forgeries were fathered onto it, as...

I’m not the one with the problem its the world who seems to have a problem with me

I am not made for despair

As I prefer to see it, there has never been an epic love story that involved significant amounts of self-control.

We’ve seen firsthand the footprints of the Mordant’s treachery.