More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 23 - August 29, 2025
A good fight was about momentum. Don’t stop. Don’t think.
Life was about momentum. Pick a direction and don’t let anything—man or storm—turn you aside.
Five years had passed. And four lifetimes.
Perhaps it was time, for once, to stop letting the rain dictate his mood.
Power was an illusion of perception, as Jasnah had said. The first step to being in control was to see yourself as capable of being in control.
They had stood above the pettiness of world politics. And because of that height, they could see so far.…
For in this comes the lesson.
“Morality is an axis that doesn’t interest us,” Mraize said calmly. “Only loyalty and power are relevant, for morality is as ephemeral as the changing weather. It depends upon the angle from which you view it.
She was young, and questions bothered her more than fear.
I can’t help feeling words would be enough, if only I knew the right ones to say.”
Having power is a terrible burden, the worst thing imaginable, except for every other alternative.”
Find the balance. Accept the pain, but don’t accept that you deserved it.”
Being a human was about making sense of chaos, finding meaning among the random elements of the world.
Morality and law are built upon the bodies of the slain.”
“Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.”
Order was the very substance of rule. If things were organized, control could be asserted.
“Spirit, mind, and body,” the wizened ardent said, her voice echoing in the stone catacomb. “Death is the separation of the three. The body remains in our realm, to be reused. The spirit rejoins the pool of divine essence that gave it birth. And the mind … the mind goes to the Tranquiline Halls to find its reward.”
‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.’
Could words give off light?
All life worked in concert, he’d been taught in his youth. Everything but men, who refused their place.
It came together with a frightening beauty.
You don’t have to beat them. You simply have to last long enough.
Yes, I began my journey alone, and I ended it alone. But that does not mean that I walked alone.
The most important words a man can say are, “I will do better.”
A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us. But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.
