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In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.
Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for, or perhaps it is only the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.
As always in every sort of war I have known, there was delay in place of the expected fight.
The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us.
“It is easy for those who need not judge, or judging need not toil for justice, to complain of inequity and talk of impartiality.
Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman’s labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.
Not having nothing he wants hid does more to make a man brave than burnt wine, you’ll find.
“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”
“I’m not Death,” I told him, “though I’ve been mistaken for him often enough.” “I thought you were, sieur. You look so kind.”
“Do you know what it is to train your will until it’s like a bar of iron? To drive your spirit before you like a slave? To toil ceaselessly for an end that may never come, a prize so remote that it seems it will never come?”
Until we reach the end of time, we don’t know whether something’s been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted.
A man has a right to save his own life, doesn’t he?” “Not under every circumstance,” I said. I had not known the thought was in me until I had expressed it.
