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Warhammer 40000 Quotes

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Warhammer 40000 Quotes

“The door opened. I stopped. Beyond it, orks lined both sides of the corridor. They had been watching for me. The moment I appeared, they roared their approval. They did not attack. They simply stood, clashed guns against blades, and hooted brute enthusiasm. I had been subjected to too many celebratory parades on Armageddon not to recognise one when it confronted me. I went numb from the unreality before me. I stepped forward, though. I had no choice. I walked. It was the most obscene victory march of my life. I moved through corridor, hold and bay, and the massed ranks of the greenskins hailed my passage. I saw the evidence of the destruction I had caused around every bend. Scorch marks, patched ruptures, buckled flooring, collapsed ceilings. But it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. Only enough for this… this… At length, I arrived at a launch bay. There was a ship on the pad before the door. It was human, a small in-system shuttle. It was not built for long voyages. No matter, as long as its vox-system was still operative. I knew that it would be. Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka awaited me beside the ship’s access ramp. I did not let my confusion or the sense that I had slipped into an endless waking nightmare slow my stride. I did not hesitate as I strode towards the monster. I stopped before him. I met his gaze with all the cold hatred of my soul. He radiated delight. Then he leaned forward, a colossus of armour and bestial strength. Our faces were mere centimetres apart. My soul bears many scars from the days and months of my defeat and captivity. But there is one memory that, above all others, haunts me. By day, it is a goad to action. By night, it murders sleep. It lives with me always, the proof that there could hardly be a more terrible threat to the Imperium than this ork. Thraka spoke to me. Not in orkish. Not even in Low Gothic. In High Gothic. ‘A great fight,’ he said. He extended a huge, clawed finger and tapped me once on the chest. ‘My best enemy.’ He stepped aside and gestured to the ramp. ‘Go to Armageddon,’ he said. ‘Make ready for the greatest fight.’ I entered the ship, my being marked by words whose full measure of horror lay not in their content, but in the fact of their existence. I stumbled to the cockpit, and discovered that I had a pilot. It was Commander Rogge. His mouth was parted in a scream, but there was no sound. He had no vocal cords any longer. There was very little of his body recognisable. He had been opened up, reorganised, fused with the ship’s control and guidance systems. He had been transformed into a fully aware servitor. ‘Take us out of here,’ I ordered. The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up was drowned by the even greater roar of the orks. I knew that roar for what it was: the promise of war beyond description.”

WarFearBattleNightmareWarhammer 40kNemesisWarhammer 40000OrksEternal War
Book:Yarrick: The Omnibus
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“You fall, you rise, you continue on, refusing to believe your failures until once more they strike you down. You return, slowly diminishing, but unwilling to stop, unwilling to succumb. You are your race, Lucius. You are humanity and as with the rest of your kind, I delight in your dance, all the way to its end.”

HumanityCorruptionDefianceHumanity QuotesWarhammer 40000Chaos Space MarinesDefiantDefiance Quotes
Book:Lucius: The Faultless Blade
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“What is memory but the fashioning of a deep and personal fiction? In memory, we shape the world around ourselves, as if to prove our own existence, to demonstrate the mark we have left upon the universe. We become heralds of something better; the guiding light by which we believe all others might navigate. This, then, is the comfort we award ourselves for the act of living, for to comprehend the truth – that the universe is cold and ambivalent at best, and at worst despises our very existence – is to contemplate madness. So it is that we grow to love the lie.”

UniverseExistenceFictionLivingMemoryTruth And LiesNavigationWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Black Library
Book:Awakenings
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“Sometimes, I consider whether the Emperor hated the Primarchs the way Fulgrim hates us." "Speak for yourself. Our father does not hate us." "Of course he does. From afar, you feel the lie of his warmth, the false affection you all so urgently crave. And he gives it to you but always from pity. You are his champion, yet still you cannot see it. You will never be as close to him as I was. You never see the way he really looks at us. Never seeing the wonders we wrought, only the limitations. Not our triumphs, just our flaws. He hates us, Lucius, because to Fulgrim, we are not his sons. We are a mirror, holding up an image before him that he can never do anything other than hate. We are his own failure made manifest, the miscarriage that comes about when a father tries to mould his children into something better than himself.”

AmbitionReflectionHatredDisappointmentWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Chaos Space Marines
Book:Lucius: The Faultless Blade
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“The gods love you, Fabius. You delivered a Legion to them. You opened the door with your twisted ingenuity, in ways Erebus could not conceive. And you are still opening that door, every time your scalpel draws a red line across flesh. The universe is made of two parts--a knife and a stone. If you do not wield the one, you must lay upon the other. And you wield the knife very well indeed.”

SacrificeCorruption QuotesWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Mad ScientistChaos Space MarinesFabius BileFall From Grace
Book:Fabius Bile: The Omnibus
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“Rhacelus rebuked himself. These thoughts would not do. Antros was of the librarius. Mephiston judged him worthy, so should he. He was getting intolerant in his old age. Antros was the same as any psyker. They were all strange, it was in their nature. He forgot, sometimes, that he was no different to his brothers. 'My eyes glow all the damned time, and I am charmlessly misanthropic,' he scolded himself.”

HumourWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Blood Angels
Book:The Devastation of Baal
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“Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the act of kindness feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers think the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you.”

ChaosGodsWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Will Of GodDark God
Book:Fabius Bile: The Omnibus
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“I have never really understood our gene-father's obsession with martial glory. It always seemed to me more efficient to simply eradicate our foes from orbit. Pound the earth flat and build over the ashes. And if they dig in? There are ways. Saboteurs, chemical weapons - there are hundreds of ways of dismantling a world and its population that do not involve orbital insertions and glorious advances into the teeth of enemy fire. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours. And here I thought you were the clever one. I figured that out the day of my culling, when my family forced my cousins and me to fight for the honour of joining the Third. War as you describe it would be little more than pest control. What is there for the gods to feed on? Where is the desire for victory, the savagery, the hope and despair? Where is the entertainment? I believe you have made my point for me. No, you are not listening. On my pilgrimage, I learned much. Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the kindness of the act feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child, and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers believe the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you, Fabius.”

BattleWarfareBattle QuotesWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Warfare QuotesFabius Bile
Book:Fabius Bile: The Omnibus
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“Thus are dreams dashed and good intentions lost. Everything returns to the dust, and everything is reduced to blind fighting in the shadowed ruins of cities against men who were brothers until madness claimed their minds. Everything returns to the dirt, and the dirt becomes your camouflage, and hides your face and your cap badge in the dark, when death comes, growling, to find you out.”

Battle QuotesWarhammer 40000Fighting QuotesDan Abnett
Book:Sabbat Worlds: Of Their Lives in the Ruins of Their Cities
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“What can we really do for this Imperium? Can we sustain it now, bearing its weight on our shoulders? Not the way we were made. But we can kill for it. We can break, we can burn, we can unmake. We have done everything they asked of us. We have held their battle line, scored it with our own blood, and it has not been enough. If we are to die here, on a world that has no soul and no open sky to rejoice in, then we will die doing what we were schooled to do.”

BattleDefianceBattle QuotesWarhammer 40000Horus HeresyLast StandCounterattackDefiance QuotesWhite Scars
Book:Warhawk
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“Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void. 'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.' It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.' Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep. But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite. It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed. 'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.”

DefianceWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Last StandDefiantSpace MarinesPyrrhic Victory
Book:Warhawk
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“In my experience, you mon-keigh make a great many claims when it comes to your own prowess, awarding yourselves title after title, your psyches awash with the hope that such posturing will intimidate your foes." "Undeniably true, though that seems harsh criticism from a species that attaches poetic nonsense like" The Storm of Silence" and "The Cry of the Wind" to its demigods, no?”

NamesScience FictionTitlesWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40000Chaos Space MarinesHonorifics
Book:Black Legion
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“So it is with nephilla and their masters, especially the Architect of Fate. The balance of power is never certain and lies are so easily cloaked in the lightest truth. From that first encounter to the last on the eve of Caliban’s death, I thought I was in control and forged a path for Caliban and the Order. In truth, I was waylaid long ago by a false map and led like a fool into the most treacherous depths, from which I never freed myself. It is always the way when dealing with the powers of the warp. Your first steps always seem to be in the right direction, but you will never know at what point you started following their road, because after a time you forget there was a destination at all, and all that remains is the journey.”

Warhammer 40000The Horus HeresyBlack LibraryQuotes About TruthQuotes About Power
Book:Luther: First of the Fallen
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