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March 22 - July 18, 2025
“Children are often like that, Syl,” his mother said. “Accepting only one answer to any question, because nuance is difficult and confusing.”
“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?”
“The words?” Wit said. “Of course not. Your face while I say them though? Well, it’s been said I am an artist. Unfortunately, the primary subjects of my art can never experience my creations, as displayed upon their features.”
“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. So convenient to make suffering their own fault, rather than life being unfair and birth mattering more than aptitude. Or storming Passion.”
“A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point.”
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.”
“You know what first drew me to you, Kaladin?” Wit asked. “You did one of the most difficult things a man can do: you gave yourself a second chance.”
If you get a chance today, stop and take a look in a mirror, acknowledge what you’ve become. I don’t care about heritage or legacy. I care about what we are.
“We’re Radiants. We have something they never will: we’ve spoken truth to ourselves.”
“It’s not the gambling itself that got me. It’s that I built up how it would feel to win, only to come crashing down each time, leaving me feeling like I’d missed out on something I was owed.
“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.”
“Ideals are dead things,” Kaladin said, “unless they have people behind them. Laws exist not for themselves, but for those they serve.”
The darkness didn’t die, but it retreated as all darkness did before light.
It 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.
The storm carried Roshar itself—the stone they stood upon was dropped, as crem, with the rain.
“Life was never easy when you were young, Szeth. You were merely allowed to pretend that it was. Other people were always out there making these kinds of choices.”
These boys didn’t remember the old kingdom, but their parents did—and their thoughts had a way of seeping into the children, like ink through too-thin paper.
“Sometimes we see farther as we age. Our posture shrinking, our thoughts elevating.”
A lot of laws and rules were the same—retaining their positions by merit of momentum, not virtue.
“You can’t punish soldiers for making good decisions—or sometimes even those who make the wrong ones. You need officers to feel comfortable making decisions. If you muddle that with a fear of repercussions, the result is indecisive leadership. And the result of that is disaster.
“My goal is nothing more than the freedom of mind, body, and will for all. Let them worship how they wish, but let them do so with their eyes open, having all the relevant information.”
am against dogma of any variety. God, nationality, or philosophy—when you become a slave to it without capacity to change or reconsider, that is the problem.”
