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When I walked around the city in my robes, I thought that others saw me as someone there to help them. Now I know different; they probably saw someone they didn’t trust, with powers they didn’t understand, someone they didn’t elect but who shaped their lives behind the scenes anyway. If they’d known how much I could shape their thoughts, too, they’d have fled from me.
A belief you suspend when it suits you isn’t a belief. It’s a lie.”
Everything that has happened in the galaxy—everything that ever will happen—is framework made up of countless connections of individual choices: yes or no, kill or spare, survive or die. They shape every moment for all eternity. One man’s decision matters. One being’s choices, moment by moment, connected to a network of billions of other choices, is all that existence is.
If we were given just one word of information in our entire history, how we’d treasure it! How we’d pore over every syllable, divining its meaning, arguing its importance; how we’d examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information, and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet … we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day, we’ll die of voluntary ignorance.
I just wish they’d stop worrying about light and dark, and learn the difference between right and wrong instead.”
Beings believe what you tell them. They never check, they never ask, they never think. Tell them the state is menaced by quadrillions of battle droids, and they will not count. Tell them you can save them, and they will never ask—from what, from whom? Just say tyranny, oppression, vague bogeymen that require no analysis. Never specify. Then they look the other way when reality is right in front of them. It’s a conjuring trick. The key is distraction, getting them to watch your other hand.
“We were having a philosophical discussion, as Mandalorians often do, and I asserted that the only demonstrable reality was individual consciousness, but he insisted on the existence of a priori moral values that transcended free will. So I hit him.”
the two would never have lasted in that relationship as long as they did if there had been a fundamental difference in their outlooks.
most beings weren’t very good at putting pieces of a puzzle together and seeing the bigger picture.
It’s entirely possible that the Jedi’s increasingly clouded vision was the result of their own moral degeneration. They’d let so many of their principles slip that the reason they couldn’t see the dark side was so close to them was the lack of sharp contrast with themselves, like trying to see a gray nerf in fog. They turned off the light themselves.
Mandalorians had a vague concept of manda, but it was very much rooted in the all-embracing continuation of the living culture rather than a literal afterlife.
“Don’t be afraid to say it—dead, death, the dead. It isn’t going to go away, and if we don’t face it, we’ll just make it bigger than it really is. Can’t live without death, can’t die without life.”
Nobody died as often or as painfully as the living left behind, who kept reliving the moment of death, and speculating on it. There was no end to their dying once they let it drive out everything else. The loved one whose end they repeatedly tried to endure and imagine was now beyond pain.
We’ve got to grieve, or else we’ve not loved her enough, but there’ll come a stage when the grieving would hurt her, and she’d want to see you all getting pleasure out of every day and every moment, all the little things you thought you’d never have. Relishing life is the best way any of you can make sure she didn’t die for nothing.
Nobody cares who your father was, only the father you’ll be.
It felt like amnesia. It was as if he’d simply forgotten all the years between but somehow knew exactly who she was, everything that mattered. She wasn’t a stranger at all; there was simply a lot to find out about her.
