Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5)

by Brandon Sanderson

“Shallan,” he said, and she looked up, meeting his eyes. “If it weren’t for that capacity, then what good would choices be? If we never had the power to do terrible things, then what heroism would it be to resist?”

Art is part of us, Kaladin. That’s the use; that’s the reason. It exists because on some fundamental level we need it. Art exists to be made.”

“Something is horribly wrong, and has been for several days now, and I can’t figure out what it is. I’ve been waiting for the truth to come crashing down.

I can tell you lol

“You think that kid who starved didn’t want to eat? You think her parents didn’t want to escape the ravages of war badly enough? You think if they’d had more Passion, the cosmere would have saved them? 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.

If hope doesn’t mean anything to you when you lose, then it wasn’t ever a virtue in the first place. It took me a long time to learn that, and I finally did so from the writings of a man who lost every belief he thought he had, then started over new.”

She watched him count the Windrunners, do the calculations in his mind, and come to the same conclusion. Almost. “How many of you,” Adolin said, “will it take to fly my horse home?”

I love him

“Take a person from the darkness and show them that light still exists. It won’t fix everything, but it does make a difference.”

“Life breaks us,” Dalinar said. “Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”

In the last years, I’ve been forced to accept that the distinction between lighteyes and dark is one of pure social construction. Nobility is not of the blood, but of the heart. But it must go the other way too. You don’t like what we represent, but to continue feeling as you do … it will eat you from the inside.”

Omfg

“If I am to give you parting wisdom,” the Herald said, “it is this: just because something is fleeting, do not imagine it to be unimportant.” He

“… Chull head,” the woman finally said. “Chull head,” Syl replied. “Down … there.” “Down there.” Syl held the woman’s eyes with an unblinking stare, before adding, “I feed it grass sometimes.”

IM CRYING

“The darkest, hairiest, greasiest bollocks on the most unkempt nethers of the most wanton demon of the most obscure religion’s damnable hellscape.”

With … a rock.”

Okay pLEASE TELL ME MOEE

“I am very glad you did not get killed while I was not here. I should like to be there when you die. It is a thing friends do for friends.”

I love Pattern

Natans,” Renarin said. “Unless you’re talking about the Aimians, who aren’t humans, but neither are quite as blue as the woman in this picture.” He hesitated, squinting at the distant woman in a vivid blue skirt, with white hair and blue skin.

I think it's Syl!

But Lift … she couldn’t change. What if Mother returned and didn’t recognize her? What if Mother looked for her and didn’t see her, so found some other little girl to love?

STOP

Isolated as the others were, he could watch and prepare exactingly how to defeat each one. Only one of them held two Shards of power, but that one was unable to function properly. Odium’s predecessor had never taken a second Shard of power for that reason.

Care, he thought. Fight for something, not simply because you’re pointed that way by a monarch, no matter how beloved.

“Wonderful ones. I’ve never known perfection, Kaladin, but I should think it boring if I did.”

“Ah, you are young yet,” he said, “if you think that to sweeten a person’s life is not a form of feeding them.”

Adolin. Were you a slut?

Of course, she thought. You are correct. A wise soldier knows all the best positions.

Lollllll

“The people in that building didn’t choose to reject you, Szeth. Maybe some of their leaders did, but the ordinary people don’t deserve this punishment.”

To go down a path of peace had its own terrible danger, especially since there was another being that the power of Odium preferred over Taravangian.

“I had an old sergeant,” Kaladin said, “in my first months in the military. He always said that he’d rather his men care, feel emotion, and feel pain. Even anger. Because we’re supposed to fight for something.” “But if you let emotion take over, it will control you,” Szeth said. “That’s the way of Odium.”

This is their cosmic battle!!!!

“And you don’t enjoy it?” Szeth asked. “The battle part?” “I…” Did he? “Yeah. Yeah, I enjoy the battle part sometimes.” “That doesn’t frighten you?”

You are both battling right now as you speak

You feel that if you take the slightest step in one direction, you might as well dash headlong without looking back?”

confronted my shame at being unable to help others,” Kaladin said. “I acknowledged I had unrealistic, impossible expectations for myself. I am learning what my mind does wrong, and have begun practicing how to counteract it. I know your issues are different from mine. They’re similar enough though. If I can improve, you can too.”

But if you had warrior thoughts to destroy such attacks from your own mind, he wondered, what then?

“I’m fine,” he promised. “Just thinking. When I needed him, Wit was always there. But he told me I would have to make my own story this time.” He shrugged. “When the darkness consumed me, he pulled me free. So maybe I can listen to him today.”

“Exactly. What about you? Are you a thing, Kaladin, or a person? Do you move merely because your instincts tell you, or do you choose to help?”

Ooh

“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.”

“It is not the same for a Fused as it is for all of you. I am bound to Odium. I can perhaps reject him verbally—but he would retain a hold on me. He could make my existence miserable next time I die. It is a … difficult thing you ask.”

He was a thick man—thick of arm, thick of thigh, thick of waist. Thick of wit. With

Damn

“One who has filled out the forms,” Challa the scribe whispered, “to live as a man.” Ah. He’d heard of that. Well, the Azish did things their own way, didn’t they? “Good to have you, Sarkuin,” Adolin said to the man, and moved on.

SLAY

Why had Honor turned against them? And before that, where had they ever found the power for such an act? Sculpting an entire city?

I think maybe Honor became Odium

was the eternal irony of the capable rhetorician: train to find holes in any philosophy, and that will inevitably extend to your own. An inquisitive mind did not stop asking questions just because it found answers.

wasn’t certain what he’d done to get the fellow’s loyalty. He needed to find a translator and ask.

Is he gonna die now?

“You came here for it,” Kaladin said. “Who was the child who died, the one you couldn’t protect?” Szeth still knelt, head bowed, and Syl tapped Kaladin on the arm. “Kal,” she whispered. “Can’t you see? It’s his. He was the child.”

Szeth wasn’t the young man who had gone to war, determined to save and protect. He was the child who had been ripped from his peaceful life, then transformed into a killer against his will. A scared little boy who just yearned to go home.

“Those were foolish expectations on my part,” Kaladin said. “A child taken from his home and twisted into a killer isn’t going to be likable. People who need help aren’t going to be reasonable all the time. Stormfather knows, I often wasn’t.”

“Rule number one,” Kaladin called after him. “You’re not a thing. You’re a person. Rule number two, you get to choose. And there’s a third rule, Szeth. You deserve to be happy.”

“A larger quibble,” she said. “I’m not in opposition to their god, because their god—as they imagine him, all-powerful and all-knowing—does not exist. I can no more be in opposition to that than I am to an imaginary childhood friend—you cannot wrestle with, fight, or oppose something that does not exist. I oppose the assumptions that people make. Because if you start with faulty assumptions…”

It was silly to miss him already. She hadn’t even been in here … what? Half a day? He probably hadn’t seen battle yet. Still, she would have felt a lot better if he were here to hold.

Uh oh

Jasnah says that the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God must be questioned by the simple evidence of injustices done in life to the innocent, such as the child who dies from disease.

“It comes!” Deti shouted. “The Night of Sorrows! I stand on the precipice of dawn and watch it advance, consuming all light, all life, all hope! IT COMES!”

Oh we are back

“How does our dying trap the Fused?” Dalinar said. “Braize,” he said. “The planet. It draws souls to it naturally. Honor fashioned it into a prison, but a prison needs a lock.”

“Our oath is that lock. Because Odium first Connected to us when he gave us powers on Ashyn, Honor could use that bond against him. That, along with the promise we made, becomes the force that holds the Fused.”

Koravellium Avast.