The Darkness that Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)

by R. Scott Bakker

He was open in the way of children and fools, and he possessed the same blessed naïveté, an innocence that smacked of wisdom rather than ignorance.

Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery?

Achamian wondered where it all went, the past, and why, if it were gone, it made his heart ache so.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

Like many arrogant men, Proyas thought his insults an extension of his honesty.

But the questions of children were only accidentally profound. Children questioned as much to be rebuffed as to be answered, as they must in order to learn which questions were permissible and which were not. To truly ask why, however, was to move beyond all permission.

“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .”

Great hunger yielded no feasts.

‘Cats look down upon Man, and dogs look up, but only pigs dare look Man straight in the eye.’”