Quotes from Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Everything is darkest," Xaphen mused, "before the dawn." "That, my brother, is an axiom that sounds immensely profound until you realize it's a lie.

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn't die. That is when I began to believe. God was real, and he hated us.

Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch. Argal Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, "We are heretics, father.

For the core of religion is the twinned principle of arrogance and fear. Fear of oblivion. Fear of an unfair life and an arbitrary universe. Fear of there simply being nothing, no great and grand scheme to existence. The fear, ultimately, of being powerless.

And as man turned from the light of day, all that was left to him was the endless night. Without contrast, he threw open his arms, and darkness took hold.

I have crusaded across his empire for over a century, raising icons and faiths in his image – and only now he objects? After a hundred years, only now am I told that all I've done is wrong?

Glory? Glory is for those too weak to find their inner strength, leaving them hollow parasites, feeding on the affection of even lesser men. Glory is for cowards, too afraid to let their names die.

Existence is strife." "To strive is to live.

The war is over, Diocletian. Win or lose, Horus has damned us all. Mankind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species' last breath. The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans. The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But it will fall, Diocletian. It will fall. The shining path is lost to us. Now we rage against the dying of the light.

Nostramo. A lawless and sunless place. It burned not because it was guilty but because we failed to keep it innocent. Our laws failed the moment we sailed away to the stars and in desperate embarrassment our father incinerated the evidence of his failure.

I will tell you how this ends, Jarl Grimnar. It ends with you on your knees, as the first High King of Fenris to bare his throat to a foe's blade. Refuse, and suffer the excommunication of your Chapter and the Exterminatus of your miserable home world

Is that not blasphemy? Defying the will of the Covenant?' 'No,' said the captain. 'It was a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming boredom.

Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for. It is why tyrants always fall. - Primarch Angron

Some truths were too ugly to be easily embraced.

We called them false angels. You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn't die. That is when I began to believe. God was real, and he hated us.

But what was a scar, really? Neither evidence of defeat, nor a medal of triumph. A scar was nothing more than a mark to show that a warrior faced his enemies at all times, never once showing his back.

Luck runs out, Blackmane. Aye. But not today, singer.

To look at Him was to go blind. To stand before Him was to die.

The tech-priest was another matter entirely. He seemed to be paying little heed to the Night Lords, occupying himself with drifting around their sanctum, an iron ghoul in whispering robes, examining curios and spare parts for their armour.

The realities of pitched warfare rarely made it into the sagas. In all the stories he'd heard, especially those woeful diatribes from the remembrancers, battle was reduced to a handful of heroes going blade-to-blade in the sunlight, while their nameless lessers looked on in stupefied awe. It took a great deal to make Khârn cringe, but war poetry never failed.

We need to appreciate what we have and strive for what we can achieve, rather than reach for what's denied to us.

The promise of mutually assured destruction had a way of calming even the fiercest hearts.

The only good is knowledge, Sekhandur. The only evil is ignorance'. 'That is a saying uttered by as many fools as visionaries and an attitude that has led to damnation more than once. The last man to speak those words in my presence doomed our Legion.

For many years, I believed Him to be a god. I was instrumental in spreading the belief myself.' 'You still believe it'. 'I know what I know. A god or not, His power renders Him indistinguishable from divinity'.