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Sometimes you can keep the peace. Sometimes you can’t, and then the only consideration left is whether smashing it yourself with as precise a blow as you can will end with fewer people dead than letting the Fates do it. The Fates are never precise: they use sledgehammers.
“And after all our world is gone and there’s no trace of us or marvels or Pylos and nobody knows if the war in Troy even happened, there it’ll fucking be, and priests thousands of years from now are going to have huge gatherings about whether or not their ideas about us are supported by fourteen oxen and three barrels of apples to Poseidon!”
whatever he’d done and whyever he’d done it, being a guest is the same as being kin, and kinship doesn’t stop just because someone has done something terrible. There are laws older than the laws of a city.
“His duty was hurting him, and this is the medicine, and the only reason you think that’s unreasonable is that your duty has hurt you much more, there never was medicine for you, and you don’t see why other people shouldn’t be hurt the same way.”
There must be a word for that, somewhere: that weird double lie you both perform when you both know something terrible is true but you both pretend it isn’t because it makes life fractionally more bearable just now.
“Suffering doesn’t make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much—you get a murderer or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.”
Some things are so poisonous than even the names are poison, and anyone who understands the word ends up sick just from the knowing of it.
They were doing some complicated thing with their government, he said, where they tried to give all the free men a vote in the Assembly. It seemed like a stupid idea to me—if you put a bunch of rich men together in a room alone without anyone who understands the real world to give them a shove in the right direction, what you’ll get is mutually exclusive with any sort of sensible policy—but he thought they were onto something.
