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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Be your blood, boy, and ignore what anyone else thinks of you.’
‘Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.’
‘When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.
sometimes luck belongs to children and madmen.
there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgement to someone else, to saying to them, ‘You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.’
I felt the tension as a pleasant thing between us, as both a suspension and a wonder.
But in the end all decisions had already been made, and they had nothing to do with me.
going into another’s mind is mostly done by being willing to go outside of your own.
‘Live with it. Many folk have to live with worse. Most of the time, you’re fine. You’re not blind. You’re not paralyzed. You’ve your wits, still. Stop defining yourself by what you can’t do. Why don’t you consider what you didn’t lose?’
You can only understand a thing when you become it.’
‘He got to the point. No idle questions about me, or you, or what was going on. He had found the thing he could do and come to do it. I like that in a man. Knowing what he can do, and doing it.
Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man’s hand and heart, and later by his head.
‘I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still, I live. And I will go on living.’
One can only walk so far from one’s true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.
Do you think that to bond or not to bond is for you alone to decide? My heart is my own. I give it where I will. I will not give it to one who thrusts me aside. Nor will I obey one who denies pack and bond.
‘Once given, a man’s word is no longer his to call back.
‘History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.’
The exercise for centring oneself is a simple one. Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.
Sometimes a man doesn’t know how badly he’s hurt until someone else probes the wound.’
There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.
One thing I have learned well in my travels. The riches of one region are taken for granted in another.
In some places water is wealth, in others the constant flooding of the river is both an annoyance and a peril. Fine leather, graceful pottery, glass as transparent as air, exotic flowers … all of these I have seen in such plentiful supply that the folk who possess them no longer see them as wealth. So perhaps, in sufficient quantity, magic becomes ordinary. Instead of a thing of wonder and awe, it becomes the stuff of roadbeds and signposts, used with a profligacy that astounds those who have it not.
