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“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.”
If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”
There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen.
After all, spies were little different from whores. Sorcerers less so.
he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed.
There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
all deeds could be chased to some potential catastrophe.
He would betray Inrau for the reason innocents were always betrayed: fear.
So little comfort in the sea. Filled by a wan loneliness,
Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood.
“They never know what we are,” Achamian said. “That’s the horrible fact of sinners. We’re indistinguishable from the righteous.”
To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?
A sorcerer and a whore. Perhaps a certain desperation was to be expected of such unions, as though that strange word, “love,” became profound in proportion to the degree one was scorned by others.
Few things were as incalculable as men who were at once stupid and thin-skinned.
Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.
Conphas had always possessed a connoisseur’s appreciation of life’s larger inconsistencies. Absurdities such as this were like delicacies to him.
Like many arrogant men, Proyas thought his insults an extension of his honesty.
Politics, he thought sourly. It was not, as the philosopher Ajencis had written, the negotiation of advantage within communities of men; it was more an absurd auction than an exercise in oratory. One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded. One sullied himself in order to be cleansed.
“No man has wit enough to reason with a fool, Zin.
Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.
I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”
You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.
Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty.
“when the world denies us over and over, when it punishes us as it’s punished you, Serwë, it becomes difficult to understand the meaning. All our pleas go unanswered. Our every trust is betrayed. Our hopes are all crushed. It seems we mean nothing to the world. And when we think we mean nothing, we begin to think we are nothing.”
Why me? A selfish question. Perhaps the most selfish of questions. All burdens, even those as demented as the Apocalypse, must fall upon the shoulders of someone. Why not him?
