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days. Such are the feelings of children. A minute of boredom is an hour, an hour is a day, and a day is a lifetime, and we share our feelings openly, for we have not yet learned the art of faccioscuro.
I know you like the legends of the old gods. Are they true? Does it matter if they are true? Or does it only matter that they inspire a true feeling in you?”
“Even a fool can be dangerous.”
Memories inhabit the minds of men. They are the myths we use to explain ourselves to ourselves: who we are, where we come from, where we go—just
The wilds were a place of honesty,
I’m far too wise to argue with priests. What I will say is that you should read more. Read more, Davico. Read widely and without favor. Read from many places and many languages, Davico.
“I think the wisdom of one moment is the foolishness of the next.
“If wisdom were easy, we would all be wise.
“The things you think, Davico, they keep you from living. If you live in fear, you are not living. You are dead already. Dead long before any danger comes for you.”
“I know that men like to see themselves more than they like to see their women’s truths.”
“You are such a boy still. Everything for you is good or bad, right or wrong, simple and clear. You are Navolese and yet you wish the world were clear as glass when in fact it is all mud and confusion. And so here you stand, wanting everything simple, as clear as Amo’s light. For you, there is only a sparkling mountain stream, or a sewer drain.
“Never discard a friend when your table is full…” my father began to quote. “…for you will find no friends when your table is empty,” I finished for him. “Grandfather. I know.”
“And yet such is our situation. To wish otherwise is to close our eyes and dream instead of facing the tiger and his teeth.”
angry? Break the mirror if you like, but the truth remains.
Your pain is not an infection, it is a wound. I should have guessed sooner, but it is an affliction of older men, whose natures are not at ease. It does not normally eat the young.”
“My family was a glass goblet, Davico, and when we fell from the table, we shattered.
“Most people do not deserve what occurs in their life. And yet still it occurs.”
“That is always the difficulty of truly worthy allies. An ally who is truly valuable is also truly powerful. Powerful enough to withhold their power, or even to betray. Any ally worth having will have the ability to choose their own path, for an ally is not a slave. An ally—a true ally—chooses you. They choose you for friendship. For advantage. For reward. For shared purpose.
It is a painful thing to abandon all excuse. To accept that all responsibility is yours alone. To know that to forge through, or fail, is simply what is.
Power does not change a man’s nature, but only makes it more so. Such was the Callarino. But the lack of power, well, that is something else, for the lack of power was most certainly changing me.
A whipped dog takes what love it can.
“It was a song of a young girl who lived with a powerful bull. The bull was kind to her and guarded her, but one night when she walked under the moon in the fields, a wolf came to her. And then every night thereafter he came to her. And eventually he seduced her. He convinced her that the bull was her enemy, and she should run away with him, and that he would dress her in diamonds. But in order to escape the bull, there was something she was required to do.” My chest tightened. “In the darkest night while the bull slept, she tore out his eyes and made a dowry amulet of them to prove her love
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I didn’t want to cry, and in any case the damage Celia had done made tears impossible,
And at last, when I thought I could not survive more, she dragged me to a shore of stillness, a place within myself that did not die.
sadness tried to come and sit upon me, along with a self-pity and a fear, but they sought a different weaker Davico, and they went away.
This was not the knowing of the mystical, it was the knowing of patterns.
