The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)

by R. Scott Bakker

“There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”

What comes before determines what comes after.

In the pros- ecution of competing human interests, the result is always unknown, and all too often terrifying.

And 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.

Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it’ll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.”

There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.

When recruiting a spy one had to open a safe place with words, make it appear that what was at stake wasn’t betrayal but a further, more demanding fidelity.

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?

The difference between the strong emperor and the weak is simply this: the former makes the world his arena, while the latter makes it his harem.

When two civi- lized peoples find themselves at war for centuries, any number of common interests will arise in the midst of their greater antagonism. Ancestral foes share many things: mutual respect, a common history, triumph in stalemate, and a plethora of unspoken truces.

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.

No longer did he gloat over future glories in the dark hours before sleep. Rather, he fretted over implications that he could neither stomach nor verify.

If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?

“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .”