The Lost Metal Quotes
"Readers tend to like their genres well delineated. Here, I was pitching something that broke apart those genre lines in ways that historically did not sell well."
"Whether I’ve been successful or not so far is up to you, the reader."
"These are the people who, when I come up with some new audacious plan, don’t roll their eyes—they instead roll up their sleeves and make it happen."
"I certainly wouldn’t have gotten where I am without the help of a large number of people."
"I know these acknowledgments are a bit of a blur of names, but I’m so grateful to each and every one of them."
"You are whatever you want to be, Wayne. You’re the wind. You’re the stars. You are all endless things."
"Anyone can be [a lawman], she said, blowing out the lantern."
"Height first. Trust me. The higher you throw it, the farther I can get it to fly."
"Gotta pretend I can’t see your cards, friends. Otherwise, where’s the sport in it?"
"But I think you’d have had a harder time of it than you believe."
"The shipping list is all very mundane... but they’ve noted which ones were inspected."
"I passed the gun emplacements at the city perimeter. I’ve been told about those."
"She gave him a flat stare, at which he just grinned."
"The governor likes it when I’m gruff. Fits his expectations better, I suppose."
"Harmony wants some of us to strike out, begin exploring, learning about the cosmere."
"You’re strong, Wayne. You can get through this."
"Rusts, they probably felt that in the next octant over."
"Your investments are too high-risk, Master Wayne."
"I told you to give it to people what don’t have any houses!"
"They have no idea how wild lady accountants can be!"
"Everything in the cosmere is made up of one of three essences."
"Investiture, matter, and energy are all the same, fundamentally."
"I . . . felt that, once, when I held the Bands. That all things were one substance."
"This explosive force . . . from such a small sample."
"I believe I’ve lectured you at length about the nature of Investiture."
"I’m afraid that whatever is happening now has grown too big to ignore."
"I have tried to handle this in other ways. I have failed."
"I realized it the other day. I’m . . . past that stage of my life."
"It was, after all, his very worst idea—and he was an absolute idiot."
"The best work is the kind you do with your arms and back."
"Every new piece of art is in some way a parody of what has come before."
"I have reason to believe the radios are compromised."
"It’s patently unfair. A mortal should not be able to stand beside one of the Bearers of the Contract and seem a fair match to their skill in imitation."
"You never really could tell what senators wanted. But fellow constables? You didn’t take up this job for glory—or at least you didn’t stay in this job for glory."
"Plans last until someone starts shootin’, mate."
"You distract that Sequence, I’ll organize our constables. The Set’s forces seem surprised by that too—look at the shock on their faces."
"The moment he saw Marasi, a man who had been about to go quietly had decided to fight."
"The city government is in on it, and so were my employers! They fired me because I got too close to the truth."
"You see those two? They represent the best of two worlds. Wax, now, he’s instinct. He’s lived a lot, been shot at a lot."
"People never wanted to listen to Steris. They preferred to nod along and think about other things."
"Yes, her heart thundered in her chest, insisting she was nervous, but what did her heart know?"
"The governor requests an explanation from the acting senator of House Ladrian."
"Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if the permissions are in place and the documents prepared. An act can still be improper."
"I’m not about what we can get away with, Wayne. It’s about proper procedure."
"Society needed robust checks on everyone’s power. Especially his."
"If I were here for another reason, I’d have shot instead of spoken."
"Wax, what are you doing? Beginning an investigation."
"This is not a place for a woman who has been a sitting senator for less than an hour."
"Independence Tower is a central hub of activity for our esteemed antagonists, and I’d bet it has an entrance to the caverns."
"Note, though, I’m not a lady. I work for a living."
"The office building—the Dulouis Building—is both a hotbed of Set activity and at the perimeter of one of the locations with tremors."
"Breaching [Independence Tower] has proven beyond even the arts of the Survivor himself."
"The Set has developed a bomb capable of wiping out Elendel."
"They have a dark god breathing down their necks, demanding results."
"By the first aether . . . we should contact the master."
"We have reason to believe that the Set has discovered the relationship between harmonium and trellium."
"Bullets though, they didn’t send him into shock or anything. So they just hurt. Like Death’s own eyes."
"Her missions didn’t usually involve things like throwing Wayne out windows like he was a rustin’ cat."
"I drink with bastards, liars, and fools. But I draw the line at someone like me."
"You’re something far, far worse. You’re someone who wants to be me."
"You can’t kill me. I’m already dead. I been dead for years, sister."
"You think you know me? You think you know what I’ve been through?"
"By your actions here, you prove this gift wasted."
"It’s only in the struggle to survive that a person—a people—achieves their potential."
"What’s any of this for, if people can’t change?"
"The problem though, ain’t it? Because I do terrible stuff!"
"You mess up a lot less than you fix, Wayne. You are a good man."
"You can’t keep digging up the corpse of who you used to be, Wayne."
"This next part is going to be bloody, Wayne. How much healing do you have left?"
"I’m a constable, Entrone. My strength isn’t in myself. It comes from the people."
"My strength never came from Allomancy. It doesn’t come from weapons, or even the credentials I carry."
"Wax and Wayne have stopped the launch. Elendel is safe."
"Some things cannot be planned for in life. I struggled to learn that, Varlance. But there is one thing I’ve learned that is true: No matter what else happens, Waxillium Ladrian will get wherever he needs to be. Somehow."
"People suffered when the truth became a commodity to be speculated upon."
"Please. Tell me you lived those years of freedom."
"What do you think we’re doing? Delivering a payload. To Elendel. It’s a weapon, right? We drop it off, then we get out of there?"
"You can’t do this for forgiveness. You need no forgiveness, not anymore."
"Your talents have previously been wasted, Lady Ladrian."
"It is possible to see future needs. I understood it would be good to make this choice, though one doesn’t always know why."
"My job isn’t to be certain. My job is to do the best I can. Even with limited information."
"You can’t protect this world, Saze. We have to face it. Something’s happening to you."
"How does this help? You can now burn duralumin."
"I’m the best there is. And no being, neither god nor mortal, could have wished for more than one such as you."
"Was that the biggest damn explosion a person ever made?"
"What a waste. I thought your evacuation plan was exhaustive, but this is even more so. It’s brilliant."
"Ain’t no fellow who regretted giving it one extra shake, but you can bet every guy has regretted giving one too few."
"The Bands were merely a symbol. Part of a larger power play."
"War was one of the main disasters Steris had to spend her time preparing for."
"Questions were part of who he was. He just wished he knew for certain that the choice was his."
"I need experience. I need to see if I'm any good at this sort of work."
"I found I couldn't content myself with a constable's job after what I'd seen and learned. I needed to be able to change things. Actually change things."
"Your life is yours. And you have my deepest apologies that I had a hand in teaching you otherwise."
"Being one man did not prevent him from being the others as well."
"Compounding seems beyond the abilities of any Hemalurgist created in this more modern era."
"The secret to cracking why this is, and how to circumvent it, could be of utmost importance."