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You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.
What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth.
The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience.
Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.’
‘Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.
He took a breath. ‘Cover it,’ he begged, laughing, and as I did so, he turned away from it. He walked almost hastily to the chamber window and looked out.
Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable. I set out.
Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times go by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all
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Yet even those things now seemed but diversions dancing before my eyes to keep my attention from the immense reality beyond them. All of this existence was composed of trivial pains and searing agonies, and each of them was yet another mask between me and the face of the eternal.
So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.
Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colours fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
A burden shared not only can lighten it; it can form a bond between those who share it. So that no one is left to bear it alone.’
To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibilities, to be bound by the rules of that group.
To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step towards seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.
Men. If it was raining soup, you’d be out there with a fork.’
Love demands that we grasp it all, today.’
love doesn’t come first and linger after, if love can’t wait and endure disappointment and separation, then it’s not love.
I used to doubt the Fool when he told me that all of time was a great circuit, and that we are ever doomed to repeat what has been done before. But the older I get, the more I see it is so. I thought then that he meant one great circle entrapped all of us. Instead, I think we are born into our circuits. Like a colt on the end of a training line, we trot in the circular path ordained for us. We go faster, we slow down, we halt on command and we begin again. And each time we think the circle is something new.
Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.
we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.
‘Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world’s face.’
Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.’
You could swear fealty a thousand times to me, but if tomorrow you thought a good purging would aid me in some way, you’d slip me an emetic.’
‘Time. Time is the only thing we have, when all is said and done, and yet we never have enough of it. You can be calm about it; you’ve had as much of magic as you’ve ever wanted, and more, all your life. While I’ve had to claw and scratch for a tiny shred of it at the end of my days. Where is the justice of fate, when a half-wit has in abundance and values not at all that which I so desperately lack?’
of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.
What a strange, cruel spiral we’ve danced.’
‘It would be ironic,’ I panted to Burrich and Dutiful, ‘if after all these years of longing to die, he finally perished in an attempt to live.’
Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life?
I left behind the beauty and grace of the Elderlings and descended into the grubbiness and destruction of humanity and I felt ashamed of my kind.
All that night, I cradled him in my arms, as closely as if he were my child or my lover. As closely as if he were my self, wounded and alone. I held him while he wept, and I held him after his weeping was done. I let him take whatever comfort he could in the warmth and strength of my body. I have never felt less of a man that I did so.
‘I’m just … I’m outside my time, Fitz. I’m a fish in the air or a bird beneath the sea. I’m past my life and I grope forward through each day, wondering what I am meant to do with myself. It’s hard. It’s very hard for me.’
though she claims to be a queen, she allowed him to master and drive her. I said that her mating must have addled her brains. That put her into a froth, I can tell you.’
