Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5)

by Brandon Sanderson

“I’m a storyteller,” Wit said, with a flip of his fingers. “I have the right to redefine words.” “That’s stupid.” “That’s literature.” “It’s confusing.” “The more confusing, the better the literature.” “That might be the most pretentious thing I’ve ever heard.” “Aha!” Wit said, pointing. “Now you’re getting it.”

How convenient to believe that people are poor because they didn’t care enough about being rich. That they just didn’t pray hard enough. So convenient to make suffering their own fault, rather than life being unfair and birth mattering more than aptitude. Or storming Passion.”

“Sir,” he said, going stiff. “Please, no. I’m broken.” “Life breaks us,” Dalinar said. “Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”

“You are normal,” Drehy said. “Or rather, nobody is normal. Normal doesn’t exist. So if we slavishly try to dress ourselves to imitate it, all we’re really doing is becoming a different kind of abnormal—a miserable kind.”

She needed to be careful about how she judged people. It was the artist’s way to paint a picture of someone the moment she saw them—but art was locked to the page, and a person was always so much more than any image could contain.

“Shallan,” Pattern whispered, “what did Wit say?” “I know…” “Repeat it.” “I don’t deserve it,” she whispered. “What was done to me is not my fault. It’s all right to accept that I have pain, but I shouldn’t accept that I deserve it.”

people break, and sometimes the strong ones break harder than the weak ones—because they’re the ones you pile everything on top of.

“I believe that in nothing are we so blessed,” Kadash continued, “as we are in our ability to accept one another as imperfect, yet trying.